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The 2023-2024 academic year has been another outstanding period for our AAPP collegiate chapters, showcasing their dedication to promoting psychiatric pharmacy and mental health awareness. Forty-seven collegiate chapters submitted annual reports, highlighting significant community service, campus activities, research, and professional growth. The 2023-2024 year also saw 64 in-person attendees to the annual AAPP meeting, with sixteen posters presented across eleven schools of pharmacy.

Completion of a quality improvement or research project is a common requirement of all ASHP-accredited pharmacy residencies. While many residents seem to dread this aspect of postgraduate training for various reasons, it stood out as one of my favorite components. Over and over, my patient encounters energized me with ideas of innovations I could explore to improve the quality of psychiatric care.

Opioid overdose deaths remain a prevalent issue throughout the United States, with over 81,000 reported deaths due to opioid overdose in 2023 (CDC, 2024). There is an urgent need to spread awareness regarding drugs of abuse and counterfeit drugs, as well as to reduce harm in our communities. The AAPP-University of Southern California (USC) student chapter has established our NaloxoneSC Program to do just that.

The Indian Health Service (IHS), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, provides comprehensive health care to around 2.8 million American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) across 37 states belonging to 574 federally recognized tribes. The federal government established a special relationship with these tribes in 1787 to provide health services and raise their overall health status to the highest level.

Though the introduction of telehealth into modern medicine was inevitable given recent technological advancements, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a health care system-wide change to prioritize telehealth care modalities to minimize health and safety risks for patients and providers alike. This dramatic shift led to lasting changes in patient care delivery models and, as a result, impacted trainee/learner rotations. Telehealth, along with hybrid or fully virtual rotation models, are here to stay.

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AAPP community leaders, committees, and taskforces have been hard at work planning the next AAPP Communities Week, a 3-day virtual event taking place October 21-23, 2024! This event is exclusively for AAPP members, and you’re invited!

As a growing specialty working in a profession where there are exponentially more and more patient care needs, the importance of attracting and training pharmacy students to the field has never been greater. AAPP members are critical in supporting this growth through precepting and educating students and/or by advising an AAPP Collegiate Chapter.

Congratulations to Elayne Ansara, Dana L Chiulli, Tera Moore, Mark Schneiderhan, Megan Ehret, Christ Herndon and all the other members making an impact in psychiatric pharmacy!

Almost 1 out of 5 mental health providers will experience patient loss to suicide in their career, and, although many providers will note this as a career-defining moment, those clinicians may not receive support in navigating patient suicide loss. The AAPP Foundation sponsored the presentation “Living Through Loss- Navigating Loss by Suicide as a Clinician-Survivor” by Dr.

Over the past 9 months, the AAPP Board has completed a thorough review of the association’s site selection processes and the event landscape. Through this process, the Board gained valuable input, learned how significantly event site selection is heavily influenced by market forces, and realized the delicate balancing act involved in weighing available/bidding venues with overall value, convenience, and member experience to find the best option available.

At the AAPP 2024 Annual Meeting, Dr. Chelsea Di Polito, PharmD, BCPP presented “The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown of Psychotropic Stewardship Implementation: A Focus on Antipsychotics”. Dr. Di Polito is the Assistant Director of the Peer Review for Mental Health Drugs Program through the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and works in the Peer-to-Peer program with Medicaid to reduce unnecessary antipsychotic prescribing to children and adolescents.