Here we are with the second installment of my weekly intern blogs and Week Three of my online ASHP summer internship tied up and tucked away on the shelf. I can’t believe how much I’ve learned from my preceptors so far! This quote from John F. Kennedy about sums it up: “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” We cannot learn without first being led, and we cannot lead without life-long learning. What exactly does that mean in terms of my internship experiences and newfound knowledge from ASHP? Well, this quote addresses three prevalent questions from my work this week: 1) What do ASHP members need at this moment in time? 2) What can we do to advance the pharmacy profession and ensure optimal patient outcomes? 3) After finessing the minute details, what is the goal we are trying to achieve? This week’s events on my calendar ranged from webinars, to 200-person staff update meetings, to Skype for Business meetings with preceptors to develop policy synopses and assess quality measures. Influenced by these experiences, I have shifted from being preoccupied with minute details to focusing on underlying objectives in association management and advancement of the pharmacy profession—from a “tree” to “forest” perspective.
On to the first question: what do members need at this moment in time? I understood the importance of this question from an ASAE webinar I attended on Tuesday titled The Impact of COVID-19 on Membership: A CEO Dialogue. You can’t continue to move an association forward if your members are still in need of something vital. The learning component here is intuitive: we at ASHP must assess areas in which members require support to solidify engagement and development of the association. An excellent example of this holistic assessment of member needs and prompt action is ASHP’s new program to be COVID care certified, a product put together in just five weeks and updated frequently as we find out more information every day. Most exceptionally, the new ASHP Task Force on Racial Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion amplifies member voices and allows pharmacy to be practiced at the highest level. And that’s the leadership component: unity and fellowship in practice, driven by rich cultural diversity.
On to the second question: what can we do to advance the profession and ensure optimal patient outcomes? This week, I have been fortunate enough to help with policy development for safe medication practice and other initiatives to emphasize the value of the pharmacist to the health care team, two actions targeted toward these goals. For the former, I was exposed to policy by working with Dr. Eric Maroyka to sift through existing ASHP policies, statements, and guidelines and then compile those into an issue synopsis document. (This has been one of my favorite projects so far since I was able to combine my passions for pharmacy, analysis, and writing into a substantive document.) We can advance the profession and improve patient outcomes by advocating for the value of the pharmacist’s specific skillset, whether it be with pharmacists’ involvement in COVID testing or demonstration of pharmacists’ unmatched medication expertise in particular processes in their practice settings. As the incoming ASHP president Dr. Thomas Johnson expressed in his inaugural address titled “Truth in Transformation,” we will then be able to “further establish our pharmacy presence.”
On to the third and final question: after finessing the minute details, what is the goal we are trying to achieve? Dr. Thomas Johnson’s inaugural address again comes to mind when answering this question. He reinforces this idea of inseparable leadership and learning. What is one of the overall goals of ASHP and pharmacy practice? Servant leadership. I witness day after day how ASHP staff members reach out to their colleagues and volunteer leaders to coordinate and execute initiatives (with many witty jokes and refreshing camaraderie), and I witness day after day how health care workers go to work amidst this pandemic to safeguard our community’s health. We learn from each other and use that learning to lead each other onward. “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other,” and it is this servant leadership that we uphold as leaders in pharmacy, to fulfill ASHP’s mission of optimal health outcomes.
Ella Domingo
Pharm.D. Candidate, Class of 2023
Purdue University College of Pharmacy