This past weekend the ONU student chapter of ASCP attended the national conference for the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists in Dallas, Texas. First, I want to start off by telling all of you what even is a consultant pharmacist. A consultant pharmacist works with geriatric (seniors) patients in nursing homes, assisted living homes, and other long term care facilities doing medication reconciliation, counseling on medications, checking charts along with many other duties. Many older patients are on a lot of medications, sometimes patients are taking twenty different medications and they have no idea why they are even taking them. The geriatric population is most at risk for medication errors and adverse reactions caused by medications, so it is the consultant pharmacist's job to be the drug information resource in these long term care facilities.
The Ohio Northern University student chapter of ASCP attended the national conference this past weekend. At the conference ONU brought three student posters and the advisers of the student chapter, Dr. Kelly Kroustos and Dr. Kristen Sobota, gave two lectures on student chapter involvement. The three student posters were on the different types of outreach the student chapter works on. The first poster presented by Michaela Wolford and Joshua Soppe was about teaching seniors how to use reputable websites to search for health related information. The second poster was presented by Brianne Mosley and Jessica Delbecq on Fidget Blankets. This outreach promotes the non-pharmaceutical approach to consul Alzheimer and dementia patients by giving them blankets with sensory stimulating things on them. The third poster was presented by Julia Dickman, Nora Fakhoury and Nathaniel Wilhelm on the Music and Memory outreach, which is an outreach dedicated to Alzheimer and dementia patients. This program loads music from the seniors' youth onto iPods and then distributes the iPods to seniors.
The ONU ASCP chapter was well represented by each of the student presenters and the advisers. ONU lead the charge of student involvement and shared it's unique integrative outreaches with student chapters around the country.
During the conference students attended many lectures expanding their knowledge of long term care facilities, how to care for geriatric patients more effectively and how to advocate for the profession of consultant pharmacy and geriatric patients.
The students and the advisers on this trip are some seriously special people. While attending lectures gave all the students new perspectives on caring for geriatric patients; the mentorship between younger and older students and the advisers opened the door for a more collaborative and beneficial style of learning. From the perspective of a younger student, simply talking and asking questions with older students and the advisers taught me so much about professionalism and the practice of consultant pharmacy.
To all pharmacy students, especially younger students, get involved in professional organizations! They will teach you so much about the profession of pharmacy and give you the opportunity to develop relationships with older students as well as professors.
To learn more about ONU's chapter of ASCP or to get involved in ASCP please message Onu Ascp on Facebook for more details.
