A number to you, a life to us
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Samantha Keen is a second-year PharmD candidate and Madison Smith is a third-year PharmD candidate at the East Tennessee State University Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy.
To say we are honored to be the winner of APhA–ASP’s Generation Rx 2019–2020 National Award is an understatement. To those of us at the East Tennessee State University (ETSU) Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy, winning means more than receiving an award; it means we have made an impact. Our mission with Generation Rx, now Operation Substance Use Disorders, is to educate the public on the dangers of misusing prescription medications, opioid overdose, naloxone usage, and combating the stigma associated with substance use disorders.
Chapter reports rely on numbers to gauge the effectiveness of chapters across the country. This may seem like a numbers game to many people, but to our committee members, it shows the impact we have made on our community with every individual trained to use naloxone, every medication collected during a drug take back event, or every child and adolescent educated about the dangers of medication and drug misuse. It means a potential life saved. We reach the people of East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia, which is an area that has some of the highest rates of opioid-related deaths in the country. We challenge those we work with to be change agents in their community, and we challenge you to think beyond the numbers to the impact you can make in reversing the epidemic of drug-related deaths.
Another set of numbers
ETSU’s Generation Rx initiative enjoys considerable support from our school, our faculty advisor Dr. Sarah Melton, community partners, and the student body. Incoming students are also excited to get involved when they hear about our mission to make an impact in the community. Our chapter encourages student leadership by allowing Generation Rx to have a chair, co-chair, and P1 liaison as the base of the committee, which creates a strong leadership team and allows the committee to grow in numbers. We have a large outreach program because of the number of student pharmacists providing trainings and participating in projects such as the drug take back programs. We can reach a broad range within our community by offering multiple trainings/events simultaneously. We also build our numbers by working inter-professionally, working closely to train our medical school colleagues, student nurses, faculty members, resident life staff, and students across the university. We also plan to increase access to naloxone by providing even more training as we add to the number of people who carry naloxone along with increasing awareness of the accessibility of naloxone across campus in automated external defibrillator devices.
Growing our numbers
The transition from Generation Rx to Operation Substance Use Disorders has fueled our fire. We are excited to grow our offering of trainings, educational material distribution, and event hosting to address substance misuse and the development of disorders across age groups with an emphasis on how pharmacists are key to providing education and interventions on the front line in a variety of pharmacy practice settings.