March 2, 2010
The Carolina Association of Pharmacy Students at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy is the recipient of a $2,000 Project CHANCE award from the American Pharmacists Association to provide medication-therapy-management services at a local health clinic.
The grant will allow pharmacy students to provide medication-therapy-management services to select patients at the Student Health Action Coalition Clinic at the Carrboro Community Health Clinic in Carrboro, N.C. Jennifer Byrns, a third-year PharmD student and the lead author of the School’s proposal to APhA, says pharmacy students will enroll in the project ten to fifteen patients who use the emergency department at UNC Hospitals as their primary source of health care.
“We will look for patients taking multiple medication for multiple disease states,” Byrns says. “These are also people who cannot or do not make health care a priority in their lives so we plan to offer incentives to encourage them to work with us.”
Once the patients are enrolled in the program, student pharmacists, who work under the supervision of the clinic’s residents and director of pharmacy, will interview them to determine their medical condition, review all medications they are taking identify any conditions that are going untreated, and look for any unwanted interaction between the medications the patients are taking, whether they are prescription, over the counter, or herbal and natural remedies.
The Project Chance grant will allow the student pharmacists to interview the patients once during the fall 2010 semester and once again in the spring semester of 2011.
“We want to know whether we as students can make a difference in the health of these patients through this intervention,” Byrns says.
The students’ project for the Chapters Helping Advocate for Needy Communities Everywhere award is titled, “A Student Pharmacist Led Initiative to Increase Medication Compliance and Health Literacy in an Uninsured Population of North Carolina.” They will submit a poster detailing their work at next year’s APhA annual meeting.
The American Pharmacists Association Academy of Student Pharmacists collaborates with the Pharmacy Services Support Center of the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration to offer the award to up to ten APhA-ASP chapters, of which CAPS is one. This APhA-ASP/PSSC awards program encourages student pharmacists to develop a community outreach project in a 340B entity setting. A 340B-eligible entity is one that is covered under a program created by the Veterans’ Health Care Act of 1992 that requires drug manufacturers to provide certain drugs to covered entities at reduced prices.
Along with Byrnes, third-year student Leslie Hewes cochairs the committee overseeing this project.
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