The theme of this year’s annual celebration of the pharmacy profession is Pharmacists: Caring for You.
Designated September 25 by the International Pharmaceutical Federation, World Pharmacists Day is an opportunity to celebrate the pharmacists in your community.
The theme this year, Pharmacists: Caring for You, was chosen to celebrate pharmacists’ increasingly central role in providing frontline care to patients. Pharmacists, especially those in our communities, form lasting relationships with their patients and have a vital role in the outcomes of medication therapy.
Here are some ways that Waterloo Pharmacy students and faculty have impacted our community in the last year:
Outreach and Education
Many of our students have visited classrooms and shared information on medication safety, handwashing and quitting smoking. Students Sarah Blythe and Katie Gammage presented Kids and Medicine while on co-op in Ottawa, and many students visited KW schools as part of Pharmacist Awareness Month in March 2016.
School of Pharmacy faculty and graduate students have also partnered with local retirement communities to help seniors learn to use digital health resources. By pairing up students and seniors to explore tools for monitoring and researching health, the older adults gained a sense of agency over their healthcare and our students had the opportunity to get to know and learn from these individuals.
Our students also volunteered with populations that are desperately in need of support. Danyah Musbah translated medication instructions for Syrian refugees, and Heidi Fernandes travelled to Peru to run clinics in the slums of Pamplona Alta.
Research and Public Health
Waterloo Pharmacy faculty are engaged in research that will improve the experiences of Canadians as they interact with the healthcare system.
For patients in rural parts of the province, travelling for healthcare needs can be inconvenient. Dr. Tom McFarlane has partnered with Grand River Hospital to help address this issue in cancer patients, a group of patients who often travel far and frequently to receive adequate care. To provide rural Ontarians with medical support while minimizing the need for travel, McFarlane and his team will provide cancer patients with counselling via telemedicine. With phone and videoconferencing, they will serve patients while inconveniencing them as minimally as possible.
Ontario Pharmacists are now able to administer flu vaccines, but in order to understand the utilization of this service and to increase its impact and accessibility for Ontarians, specific data is required. Dr. Nancy Waite’s team collects and interprets data on pharmacists as vaccinators, and their results provide evidence as to the effectiveness of this expansion of the pharmacist’s role.
For Canadians living with Hepatitis C, access to effective medications can be tricky: the medications are expensive and not often covered by drug plans. To help the government determine whether or not funding can be provided for these medications, Dr. William Wong is conducting a CIHR funded study into patient perspectives and experiences living with Hep C.
Celebrating Pharmacists Worldwide
Research projects like these inform decisions about what services are can and should be offered by pharmacists and about how the medications they dispense are accessed. As pharmacists are able to offer more services, they have an increasing need for a balance of both therapeutic knowledge and interpersonal skills.
Though they begin to hone these skills in the classroom, it is the many volunteering experiences with different groups of people that enable our students to forge connections with the community and put their knowledge into practice.