Holdford honored with Lyman Award for scholarly work
The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy will honor VCU School of Pharmacy professor David Holdford with the 2015 Rufus A. Lyman Award during AACP’s Annual Meeting.
The award – named in honor of AJPE creator Rufus Lyman — recognizes the best paper published in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education in 2014.
Holdford’s paper, “Is a Pharmacy Student the Customer or the Product?”, explores the relationship between student and institution, asserting that the ultimate customer of pharmacy education is the patient.
When pharmacy schools maintain this patient-centered focus, Holdford posits, academic entitlement and student consumerism is discouraged, and emphasis is placed on learning how to serve the medication-related needs of the patient.
“This is a highly regarded award from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy,” said VCU School of Pharmacy Dean Joseph T. DiPiro. “Dr. Holdford’s paper has received a lot of attention and gets to the heart of an important issue that all of us in pharmacy education wrestle with.”
Nominated papers are judged by utility and significance to pharmacy education, originality, research methodology and writing style.
“The selection committee recognized the thoughtful analysis that Dr. Holdford provides in considering whom is the customer of our efforts as educators, specifically is it our students or the patients,” said Gayle A. Brazeau, editor of AJPE and professor and dean of the University of New England College of Pharmacy.
“He compares the processes of our educational efforts depending upon whether the customer is the student or the patient. He argues that the most important customer is our patient, who will be served by the students we are educating. He provides a service promise for a college or school that sees the patient as the primary customer and compares it with a service promise if the student is the primary customer.”
In July, Holdford will be recognized with a certificate and $5,000 monetary prize during AACP’s Annual Meeting, Pharmacy Education 2015, at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Md.
Earlier this year, he received the 2015 American Pharmacists Association-Academy of Pharmaceutical Research and Science Wiederholt Prize for Best Published Paper Award for Economic, Social and Administrative Sciences. That paper, published in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, is titled “Adherence and Persistence Associated With Appointment-Based Medication Synchronization Program.”
Recent previous recipients of the Lyman Award include Brown University, Ohio State University, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, University of British Columbia, University of Connecticut, University of Rhode Island, University of Tennessee and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Founded in 1900, AACP is the national organization representing the interests of pharmacy education. It serves 134 accredited colleges and schools with pharmacy degree programs, including more than 6,600 faculty, 64,800 students enrolled in professional programs and 4,900 individuals pursuing graduate study.
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