January 2021
Dear Colleagues,
The year 2020 has been extraordinary and demonstrates what truly makes pharmacy indispensable. For all of us, the past year has been one that has tested our resilience and required us to live with many uncertainties. What has remained consistent is the tremendous resourcefulness, commitment, and tireless effort by our incredible pharmacy teams to care for our patients and communities.
I am not one to use too many borrowed quotes but I thought this one by Eleanor Roosevelt was fitting for our time; “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
As pharmacy leaders, we all have embraced the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated financial impact it has had on our organizations. We also need to lead our organizations through the social challenges faced by our nation and have the responsibility to drive and instill positive change and inclusiveness. Our patients, communities, and health care teams need strong leadership now, more than ever before, because health care is a common denominator and intersection of society. It is an essential service that all rely on and almost certainly personally experience at some time.
Now is also a time when we should celebrate the multitude of recognitions that hospital and health-system pharmacists have received these past several months. I have lost count of the number of times our leaders were interviewed and highlighted in national news, both on television and in major newspapers, for their incredible work with the COVID-19 vaccination efforts. Just in these past weeks, we know our health-systems were vaccinating tens of thousands of our healthcare providers and patients with many sites administering ranges of 2,000 to 4,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses a day. We know there is a long road ahead as our beds fill up, cities and states look to increase the number of high volume vaccination sites, and we deal with uncertainties surrounding vaccine availability. Amidst all this, the rewarding piece is that many of our leaders are front and center in these large scale planning efforts while ensuring our routine patient care services focused at high levels of excellence!
ASHP and the Section continue to provide resources and to rapidly disseminate information to support our members, and ASHP continues to lead on many fronts with needed advocacy for both the practice issues and policy issues necessary to get through these trying times.
On the advocacy front, I’d like to mention and express my gratitude for ASHP’s work in defending and seeking the Department of Health and Human Services mandate for the 340B program to be administered in the legal manner it was intended. Additionally, ASHP with the collaboration of leaders from the Section, the Pharmacy Executive Leadership Alliance Advisory Panel, and the Section of Specialty Pharmacy Practitioners is on the cusp of releasing new information on ASHP’s position on white bagging of medications. These two critical advocacy areas are significant drivers of our ability to safely and effectively care for our patients and significant influencers on our organizations’ success.
There will be more to come on these issues, and we want to hear from all of you and what the Section can be doing more to support your patients and pharmacies. Please send us your comments to [email protected].
As I close, I would like to express my gratitude for our Section volunteers who have continued their efforts to provide podcasts, webinars, tool kits, and planning for future ASHP meetings. These outcomes are so important in helping us all rebuild, recover, and reimagine how our practice models will evolve in the short term and into the future.
Sincerely,
Philip Brummond, Pharm.D., M.S., FASHP
Chair, Section of Pharmacy Practice Leaders (2020-2021)
[email protected]