25 September 2022

My first FIP World Congress conference was fabulous! It was full of valuable networking experiences both with new pharmacist friends from around the world as well as with colleagues from different parts of the USA. Below is a photo of new friends from a pharmacy school in Madrid. (Much more about that in a separate blog post- they hosted me for a visit there this week.)

My research poster presentation entitled Ugandan Third Versus Fourth Year Pharmacy Student Knowledge of Pharmaceutical Care was well-received and I enjoyed talking about this work with many people. This is from a new project that Dr. Erin Pauling, one of my pharmacy practice colleagues at Binghamton University, and I are working on with colleagues from Makerere University School of Pharmacy. Eight years ago I helped them develop a pharmaceutical care skills lab to augment their clinical pharmacy curriculum and they’ve been teaching it ever since. However they still have challenges teaching it due to lack of capacity with very few clinical pharmacy faculty so we are creating new video trainings to enhance it. (The first of those were developed during my last trip to Uganda not quite 2 months ago.) The poster discusses the results of the baseline knowledge assessment and student perception of pharmaceutical care skills. There is a QR code below the poster photo where you can read it in its entirety.

One evening, the Academic Pharmacy Section of FIP (AcPS) hosted a dinner for their members at a really nice restaurant in Seville. This was an extra special occasion because the AcPS is celebrating 50 years of being an official section of FIP. In addition, a colleague from University of Kentucky, Dr. Melody Ryan, and I were honored for our work at guest editors for a special edition of the Pharmacy Education Journal (PEJ), the journal of the AcPS. We have both been working on a committee within this section for the past 3 years focused on Promoting Scholarship in Pharmaceutical Education and this has resulted in a special issue of PEJ to highlight the work of the AcPS committees over the past few years as well as celebrate 50 years of AcPS. We also accepted other papers related to the mission and vision of the AcPS.