Stepping stones in providing health care
GET CLINICAL
Maxwell Von Schubel and Imalisse Alejandro Ramirez are third-year PharmD candidates at the West Virginia University School of Pharmacy.
In the spring of 2020, the West Virginia University School of Pharmacy APhA–ASP Chapter was well on its way to finishing its mission: to visit all 55 counties in the state. No chapter before us has ever attempted this challenge, and we were determined to make it a reality. The majority of West Virginia is incredibly rural and low-income, which is why we wanted to make sure we could help as many people as we could in every corner of our mountain state.
Our chapter thrived on in-person events; from the Clay County Fair, the Nicholas County Potato Festival, to Bridge Day on the New River’s Gorge bridge, we were there. We brought all our patient care programs with us—Operation Diabetes, Operation Respiration, Operation Heart, Operation Immunization, Generation Rx, and OTC Medicine Safety, just to name a few. We were able to give point-of-care testing and information to thousands and thousands of West Virginians, and we were incredibly proud of the work we were doing.
Rolling with the punches
It was around the 30-county mark when a strange new virus started making headlines and eventually plunged everything into chaos. Our health fairs were officially canceled due to the pandemic, travel was banned, and we could not make our goal come to fruition. It was hard to adapt, but we took it as a new challenge to face head-on. We overhauled our social media presence with infographics for all our operations every month we were in lockdown. Generation Rx had online infographics on alcoholism, how to store medications, breaking stigma, and many others. We held Naloxone training over Zoom for our student pharmacists and any health care provider who wanted to attend. We even presented at the virtual APhA Institute on Substance Use Disorders.
As a chapter, we agreed that we will still carry the spirit of our school and our profession in helping as many people as we could, even if we couldn’t meet them face-to-face. This was the driving force that allowed us to continue to provide quality care for our state and our neighbors throughout the pandemic.
We were honored to receive the 2019–20 Generation Rx Second Runner-Up Award and hope to use this as a stepping-stone to reach new heights for our chapter and our state.