Students at the South Carolina College of Pharmacy–MUSC Campus enjoy their Outreach visit from Brian Donahue (center).
There’s more to it. Way more.
After having the pleasure of serving for 2 years on the APhA–ASP National Executive Committee, I knew I wanted to continue working for pharmacists and student pharmacists through APhA. I decided to apply, and was ultimately selected, for the APhA Foundation Executive Residency in Association Management & Leadership. This meant that the APhA Headquarters building on the national mall would house my cubicle, and that the great pharmacy leaders working for this organization would be my colleagues.
I knew I would be working alongside innovative pharmacy thinkers who aim to change the game. What I didn’t know at the time, is there’s a lot more to it.
The APhA catalysts
As great as all the APhA resources and individuals are, what I realize now is the magnificence of this organization are the things that are not seen. The details that go into making a meeting run smoothly, implementing a national patient care project, or simply creating a slide set for a presentation, are astounding, and the key to making involvement in APhA and APhA–ASP rewarding.
What may surprise you is relatively few pharmacists work at APhA headquarters. The building is filled with dedicated employees with backgrounds in policy, law, education, information technology, and more. Any set of skills one might imagine, you can find among the talent here at APhA. I have met people who worked at the White House and people who have worked at the theater. Working at APhA is much more dynamic than working among pharmacy
professionals. It is about collaborating with a variety of exceptional talent whose names we rarely see on screen at Annual Meetings, but they are the catalysts driving the association.
Bigger picture issues
What drew me to apply for the executive residency was the opportunity to work on bigger picture issues that affect the profession. I know whole-heartedly that pharmacy needs the majority of its great pharmacists working in the field with the acute patients and programs that make our services valuable. However, for the few such as myself motivated by it, the opportunity to help create a better, more empowered environment for all of those great pharmacists was one I had to pursue.
The APhA Foundation is the charitable arm of APhA. It works to
improve people’s health through pharmacists’ patient care services. Throughout the years, it has worked to conduct research showing the economic and health outcome value of pharmacists on the health care team. They also seek to recognize the great examples of pharmacist and student pharmacist leaders throughout the country by raising money for and awarding national Pinnacle Awards for improving the medication use process, student scholarships, and incentive grants for innovative patient care service ideas.
I have coordinated the Incentive Grant program from marketing the program to attract talented applicants nationwide, to communicating the review process to our volunteers across the country assessing applications. I have also coordinated student scholarships and created website content to better present our scholarship criteria.
I have worked side-by-side with the Foundation’s governance and nominations committee who select future members of the Board of Directors, who in turn help set the direction for the Foundation as a whole. Through it all, I still get to work with other departments in APhA on projects such as writing policy papers, and even continuing to interact directly with members on Student Outreach Program visits.
Creating a better environment
All in all, I wanted to continue working with APhA because of the important role it plays in giving all pharmacists a home and my desire to make that home a better place to empower all pharmacists. Although I interact with many individuals who have never worked in a pharmacy, they all share a passion for making the profession better. As I work on details as small as filing scholarship applications and as big as inventing programming ideas, I stay motivated knowing every bit of it works toward my ultimate goal of showcasing the best pharmacists and creating a better environment for them.
For the majority of those who read this article, you are the talent and genius that will work directly with patients and motivate me to do what I do. For the few who are driven by putting our great pieces together so the world can recognize our bigger picture, I encourage you to connect with APhA. There is more to it than you even realize yet. Way more.