Association Perspective
Scott J. Knoer, MS, PharmD, FASHP, APhA executive vice president and CEO
Three years ago, as our House of Delegates session concluded in Nashville, there was a spontaneous outpouring from members. They passionately stated that the pressures of day-to-day pharmacy work were burning them out. They urgently called for APhA, their professional home, to take action to reverse the trend. Pharmacist stress and burnout was the elephant in the room—and it still is. The added workload and stresses of caring for patients during COVID have only exacerbated the problem.
Pharmacists and pharmacy personnel’s workplace issues and their relationship to personal well-being continue to be a critical, complex issue across all practice settings. In recent decades, considerable work has been done to analyze medication errors, including near misses, and identify their root causes. What the research has lacked is a critical examination of workplace factors to determine how they affect pharmacy personnel well-being and patient safety.
For the sake of our patients, communities, and profession, we must make this right. In 2018, following the House of Delegates meeting, APhA launched a comprehensive pharmacist well-being initiative. You can visit pharmacist.com/wellbeing to learn more, but there is a new component that I’d like you to know about.
From the very beginning of our initiative, pharmacists have asked for a confidential method to report experiences in the pharmacy workplace that potentially affect patient safety—the same kind of thing that’s been available to physicians for years. Now they have it: the Pharmacist Workforce Well-Being and Reporting (PWWR) portal, which you can access at apha.us/PWWR.
The PWWR portal is designed to collect anonymous workplace reports—both positive and negative—from pharmacists, which are then shared with a federally recognized patient safety organization. That organization, the Alliance for Patient Medication Safety, will use your reports to develop best practices, education, and recommendations to enhance the pharmacy workplace and keep patients safe. Under federal law, these accounts are anonymous and confidential.
The positive and negative experiences and situations that you and your colleagues report will help to tell a collective, powerful story that can spark change and improvement in well-being and patient safety. Your PWWR report will be aggregated with others to create a pool of data used to influence and educate pharmacy leaders, government officials, and the public as well as advance meaningful and actionable changes.
I encourage you to visit the PWWR portal to share your experiences and ideas; I’m thankful for those of you who have already. You can be honest and candid without putting yourself at risk of retribution.
My friends, I’m so grateful for all you do for your patients and communities. Our journey is long and difficult, but thanks to you, we can make a way forward. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!