Pharmacy students travel to Texas for conference

04/16/09 - Twenty students from the University of Rhode Island's pharmacy program traveled to San Antonio, Texas to attend an annual conference along with more than 7,000 pharmacists and student pharmacists from across the country.Members of the URI chapter of the American Pharmacists Association's Academy of Student Pharmacists garnered two awards during the three-day conference held the first weekend in April.

The awards were presented to the group for their efforts in Heartburn Awareness and its Operation Diabetes projects.

Earlier this year the students set up booths at local health fairs and pharmacies to educate the public about the causes and preventions of heartburn. For Operation Diabetes, the group visited Rhode Island elementary schools to spread the word that diabetes is increasing among children.

"The two awards we won were rewards for us for all the hard work we have been doing this past year, and that was something really special for us," Nick Dorich, a second year pharmacy major and the president elect for URI's chapter, said.

During the conference, the students also had a chance to contribute their opinions during a voting session in which attendees discussed different proposals concerning the pharmaceutical industry.

Each year, APHA invites a house of delegates comprised of various pharmaceutical organizations from across the country that address existing bills and propose new bills pertaining to issues with drugs in the pharmaceutical industry.

The delegates came up with resolutions and proposals for issues and took majority votes on each. There were seven proposals in total.

"Any proposals or resolutions that are made are debated back and forth, much like as in Congress," Dorich said.

Ezekiel Payne, also a pharmacy student at URI, served as the voting member representative of the university. Payne also participated in a closed-door committee meeting that was concluded with the revision of two of the seven proposals.

The first proposal called to eliminate the abbreviation APAP, which stands for Acetaminophen, the active drug in Tylenol. Patients prescribed APAP are often unaware of the abbreviation's meaning on the bottle of their prescriptions.

In the most debated proposal, pharmacists weighed the importance of making drugs accessible to patients who need them most versus making a profit. While generic drugs come with cheaper price tags, they can be less potent than their more expensive, name-brand counterparts.

"With the current status of the economy right now, not a lot of people can afford their medications and you see a lot of people go untreated," Dorich said.

"I think everyone walked away with a positive experience from it and came home really excited about the profession of pharmacy and what we do," Dorich said.

The event spiced things up this year with remarks from 2008 Winter Olympic gold medalist speed skater, Joey Cheek.

Cheek opened this year's session with an inspirational talk about hard work.

"It was kind of the thing you could relate to just about anything, even for us student pharmacists," Dorich said.

According to Dorich, the APHA is the largest pharmacist association and boasts more than 31,000 members within the United States. The URI branch has been in existence for the past 40 years.

"It's the voice of pharmacy," he said.

According to Dorich, the number of members of the URI chapter has been increasing during the past several years.

"We've been getting a lot of younger leaders who are really striving to make the chapter better," Dorich said.

He hopes for a larger URI member turnout at the next meeting, in Washington, D.C. in March, 2010.