School of Pharmacy’s Remote Area Medical involvement earns top AACP award
VCU School of Pharmacy’s participation in Remote Area Medical is one of four student-led community engagement programs that will receive the 2013-14 AACP Student Community Engaged Service Award. These programs were selected because participants deliver important information about medication use to consumers and help expand access to affordable health care and improve the public’s health.
The VCU team, in addition to teams from Harding University, Samford University and University of the Pacific, will receive the award during the 2014 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy Annual Meeting.
Representing VCU’s team are Evan Sisson, faculty advisor; Natalie Nguyen (team leader) and Shaema George, who graduated with their Pharm.D. degrees in May; and rising fourth-year student Erika Lambert.
The AACP Student Community Engaged Service Award is sponsored by Teva Pharmaceuticals. Each of the four winning schools will receive $10,000 to support the expansion of their existing programs or new community engagement service projects. In addition, each team will receive a $5,000 stipend to enhance or sustain the existing program or for travel expenses to present their projects at professional meetings. Each team’s faculty advisor also will receive a $1,000 stipend along with $2,500 to cover expenses for the advisor and one student to attend the AACP meeting in July in Grapevine, Texas.
VCU School of Pharmacy students have helped provide much-needed health care to medically underserved patients in Wise County, Va., since Sisson led his first pharmacy student team in 2007 to Remote Area Medical. The RAM Volunteer Corps is a nonprofit relief organization dedicated to providing free health services to people in remote areas across the globe. RAM’s Wise County event is sponsored by The Health Wagon.
Each year, about 2,300 uninsured or underinsured patients are seen in two-and-a-half days by a crew of about 1,500 medical volunteers.
Associate professor Sisson, an alumnus of the school, says the groundwork for ensuing trips was laid that first year as students sorted donated drugs into therapeutic classes and screened donated supplies, discarding expired and/or harmful agents.
As 14 students and 10 faculty members and residents prepare for the school’s eighth annual RAM event – July 18-20 at the Wise County Fairgrounds – they can expect to participate in a plethora of activities. Pharmacy students now review medication histories and document their findings on personal health logs. They measure patients’ blood pressure, pulse, respiration and blood glucose (including initial testing of hemoglobin A1C levels if a preceptor is present). They offer preventive education on topics such as smoking cessation and conduct final reviews of patient medication histories to identify those at high risk.
Interprofessionally speaking, pharmacy students have the opportunity to work with registered nurses to review past medical history, immunization status and other health information. In addition, they assist with patients awaiting dental surgery in the dental extraction area.
Sisson first heard of Remote Area Medical about six months after joining the School of Pharmacy’s faculty. Michaiah Parker, then student body president, mentioned that her roommate, a dental student, was part of a great annual trek to Wise County to help underserved patients.
“She said, what would you think about taking some pharmacy students and acting as advisor?” Sisson recalls with a smile. He called RAM … and the rest is history.
Since then, dozens of students have gone through the application process, and many apply to return to RAM a second or even third time.
Pharm.D. student Melinda Ellis wrote this about RAM ’13: “Volunteering at RAM has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done thus far in my pharmacy career. It afforded me the opportunity to strengthen my clinical skills and knowledge, teach patients and help them understand more about their medical conditions and medications, learn about other professions, make new friends and, most importantly, provide care to patients who were overwhelmingly appreciative of what we were doing.”
Sisson, at least one student and School of Pharmacy Dean Victor Yanchick will be presented the Student Community Engaged Service Award during the AACP Annual Meeting’s closing banquet. A special session will showcase program presentations by each of the award winners.
See more photos and read student-penned stories about their experiences with RAM.
Editor’s note: In addition to RAM, School of Pharmacy students have participated within the last year in Mission of Mercy (in Charlottesville, Fairfax, Roanoke, Suffolk) and VSU Cares in Petersburg, which share a similar model of a dental focus with interprofessional support from pharmacy, medicine and nursing. Closer to home, they have worked with Project Homeless Connect in Richmond … and farther afield, with Honduras Outreach Medical Brigada Relief Effort in Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Peru. HOMBRE, also an interprofessional program, is based in VCU School of Medicine.
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