(Pictured above at the announcement of the grant award are, from left, Kathleen Jaeger, NACDS Foundation president; James Van Lieshoiut, vice president, Market Access and Pharmacy Strategy Apotex and program sponsor; George MacKinnon, vice provost for health sciences and dean of the College of Pharmacy at Roosevelt University; and Steven C. Anderson, NACDS president and chief executive officer).
CHICAGO–(ENEWSPF)–May 8, 2015. Roosevelt University’s College of Pharmacy (COP) will partner with Mariano’s pharmacies in Illinois beginning this summer to offer selected Mariano’s pharmacists and Roosevelt students training and certification in Medication Therapy Management (MTM).
Made possible with a $20,000 grant from the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (NACDS) Foundation, the new program in Clinical Services Community Pharmacy will jointly provide Mariano’s pharmacists and Roosevelt students advanced skills to help Mariano’s pharmacy patients better understand and manage use of their medications.
Beginning this summer, selected pharmacists from Mariano’s and students from the COP’s Class of 2016 will receive 20 hours of MTM training from COP professors at Roosevelt’s Schaumburg Campus. As many as 20 Mariano’s pharmacists and 40 Roosevelt students are expected to go through the program during the course of the project.
Pharmacists who have received training will begin in August to oversee trained Roosevelt students as they complete 12-week clinical rotations at Mariano’s pharmacies where they will be putting into practice newly acquired MTM skills with Mariano’s pharmacy patients.
“We expect this program to lead the next generation of pharmacists to spend more time with patients on medications, including the elderly, who, as Medicare recipients, are being required by the federal government to receive MTM services,” said George MacKinnon, vice provost for health sciences at Roosevelt and dean of COP.
Roosevelt’s pharmacy college is one of only six pharmacy education programs in the country to receive funding in 2015 from the NACDS for new patient-care research projects. The COP-Mariano’s pilot comes at a time when use of medication is on the rise by growing numbers of Americans. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), nearly half of all people in the United States currently use at least one medication per month, and an estimated 10 percent use five or more medications monthly. At the same time, the role of the pharmacist has been evolving from purely dispensing medications to providing clinical services in the community.
“With MTM certification, our students will be ready, having been trained in a primary-care setting by pharmacists to be able to identify medications causing drug reactions and complications and cases in which medications are being overused and underused,” said MacKinnon, who will be a research investigator over the NACDS-funded project.
According to the CDC, today’s primary care physicians spend nearly 40 percent of their time doing chronic care management with patients, including managing complex medication regiments. Meanwhile, it is estimated that more than a fifth of all patients using prescription medications don’t take their medications as prescribed, which leads to drug-related problems, hospitalization and increased healthcare costs.
“After their training, we expect our students to be quite capable of working with the patient’s medical providers in developing a patient-specific plan that will ultimately obtain the best outcomes for the patient,” MacKinnon said.
The project also is expected to be beneficial for pharmacists at Mariano’s, which serves patients at more than two dozen locations in Illinois.
“This new program should help us move patient care forward,” said George Kowalski, RPh, vice president of pharmacy for Mariano’s. “It also should put Roosevelt students in a competitive position for the job market when they graduate,” he predicted.
Source: www.roosevelt.edu
