Amy Werremyer, PharmD, BCPP
As we enter into the season of pumpkin spice, football, and falling leaves, it’s my pleasure to reach out and say hello as your new AAPP President. On behalf of your AAPP Board of Directors, I’d like to take a few paragraphs to reflect on some of the progress we made this summer.
As you know, the AAPP 2024 Annual Meeting is slated to take place April 7-10th just outside of Orlando, FL. We always look forward to seeing you in person, and an exciting program is already coming together. The placement of the meeting in the state of Florida dates back to a 2018 contract but is something that gave us pause and prompted renewed discussion. The mounting discriminatory legislative changes in Florida legitimately raise concerns of a potentially unwelcoming and unsafe climate for some of our membership. After much consideration of the multiple factors involved, the Board ultimately made the decision to continue the meeting at its planned location while working diligently to make and promote accommodations that support safety, inclusivity, and wellbeing for attendees. We are supporting local organizations combating the discrimination, and we will continue to offer a hybrid meeting, with virtual attendance as a possibility. Please take a moment to review information about the meeting, our efforts to promote attendee wellbeing, our guiding principles, and your ability to make an impact via donation to selected local organizations.
We have also been working aggressively for 2+ years on the multi-step, multi-faceted AAPP Outcomes Initiative. The major phases of the initiative are summarized in the graphic below.
The goal of this initiative is to support advancement of the psychiatric pharmacy profession through generation of strong research outcomes attributable to psychiatric pharmacists. Right now, we are talking a lot about the Outcomes Grant Program because the organization has committed up to $500,000 for primary research. However, the AAPP Outcomes Initiative is more than grants. There is a web of task forces, committees, and staff that is producing important resources and tools that will make the research more generalizable and useful. You can find most of those new resources in the “practice” menu on the web site.
Each of the advocacy and research initiatives has contributed significantly to the overall multi-pronged strategy we’re implementing to advance the reach and practice of psychiatric pharmacists like you. The brief paragraphs below overview the progress made and progress yet to come. We encourage you to review the resources cited and share them broadly and widely as we all work toward the common goal of awareness and acceptance of psychiatric pharmacists.
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Standardizing OutcomesAAPP developed a consensus-based set of outcomes and measures to improve research standardization. The measures in this Core Outcome Set for Psychiatric Pharmacists (COS-PP) are intended to be utilized to study the impact of psychiatric pharmacists in caring for individuals living with psychiatric disorders through consistent, measurable, reportable, and reproducible population specific outcomes that are primarily medication-related. The accompanying COS-PP toolkit is intended to provide guidance and support for research related to psychiatric pharmacist impact. Utilization of a unified core outcome set will ultimately benefit the patients by providing robust evidence of the value of having psychiatric pharmacists on the team to improve access to care, quality of care, and patient satisfaction. View the COS-PP toolkit. Coming Soon:
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Increasing Research Through TrainingThe lack of large-n high-quality studies creates a significant barrier to advocacy efforts when it is difficult to justify the impact of BCPPs to administrators, payers, regulators, and legislators. Whether you are a career researcher or a practitioner faced with clinical questions, AAPP is focusing on helping psychiatric pharmacists grow from simply quality improvement studies to robust multi-site studies. The Research Training Task Force developed a toolkit chock full of information on designing clinical research, determining outcomes, preparing for multi-site studies, and much more. View the Clinical Research Toolkit. |
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Providing FundingAAPP has pledged up to $500,000 to the AAPP Foundation to directly support multi-site studies of the impact of psychiatric pharmacists. The Outcomes Grant Initiative is in its early stages with the preliminary application window closing only a couple weeks ago. Finalists will be announced in January, and the winners will be announced at AAPP 2024! |
