Summit for the Advancement of Pain and Palliative Care Pharmacy
An Interview with Chris Herndon, PharmD, BCPS
| Chris Herndon, PharmD, BCPS,CPE, is Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacy Practice, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville School of Pharmacy, and Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Community and Family Medicine, St. Louis University School of Medicine. He has a clinical practice at a Family Health Center in Belleville, Ill. |
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Questions
1: Briefly, what was the Summit, and when did it occur?
 2: Tell us a little about your background, and what led you to take on this project?
3: How did you go about funding and developing the plan for the Summit?
4: What specific goals did you have?
5: Who attended the Summit and how was it organized?
6: What is the next step?
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Evelyn Corsini:
Briefly, what was the Summit, and when did it occur? Chris Herndon, PharmD, BCPS: The Strategic Planning Summit for the Advancement of Pain and Palliative Care Pharmacy was held at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, 10/1 and 10/2, 2009. This was a Pharmacy profession-wide summit to address the barriers and opportunities of the current educational offerings in the field of pain and palliative care for pharmacists and pharmacy students. 
EC: Tell us a little about your background, and what led you to take on this project? CH: Earlier in my career, I worked as a Clinical Pharmacy Specialist at a hospice in Texas and taught at the School of Pharmacy at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Amarillo. This was in the "infancy" of putting together pain and palliative care rotations for pharmacy students. In 2003, a group of pharmacists met at the National Pain and Palliative Care Summit in Columbus, Ohio. We came up with a number of things that we felt needed change in educating pharmacists about pain and palliative care - including attitudes, skills and knowledge. We made it our priority to organize a profession-specific summit. A major incentive for this effort is the fact that many pharmacists in general practice settings do not feel comfortable with some of the medicines in specialty areas, especially Oncology, HIV, and Pain Management. As the new generation of pharmacists is coming out there is an increased emphasis in their training on how to communicate better with patients and be accountable for patient outcomes. Pharmacy training is much more one-on-one, patient focused, than it has been in the past. Now that pharmacists are able to bill via Medicare Part D for some consultations when patients are having difficulty with medication, this practice should grow.
EC: How did you go about funding and developing the plan for the Summit? CH: This has been many years of work, and it is ongoing. In 2006, we received funding from the Mayday Foundation. With that support, we were able to develop an Advisory Board of top leaders in the pharmacy field, as well as top leaders in other professional fields so that we were not doing this in a silo. We met quarterly to develop topics and ways to address them. This became the basic logistics for the program.
EC: What specific goals did you have? CH: When you’re trying to change an entire profession’s outlook on a specific area, unless you target all of the training steps that professionals go through, you miss people at various steps. We developed six work groups to divide the pharmacy career into three areas: 1) professional degree students; 2) pharmacists in post-graduate training programs; and 3) pharmacists currently in practice. There were break-out sessions facilitated by individual advisory board members, on the following topics:
- Standards and assessment
- Curriculum
- Residency and fellowship
- Certificate program content development, core course
- Certificate program content development, practice-site dependent content
- Credentialing
We set specific goals, and asked each work group to come up with specific recommendations.
EC: Who attended the Summit and how was it organized? CH: We had representatives from over thirty professional organizations with an interest or stake in either the education of pharmacists, or the betterment of pain management and palliative care for patients. Additionally, other individual stakeholders from pharmacy, nursing, and medical professions were requested to attend. In all, 80 registrants were present for the two days of the meeting. The excellent work of our conference coordinator, Donna Boyer, was crucial to our success.
EC: What is the next step? CH: The break-out group facilitators are writing their reports, and are working to put together abstracts and posters for presentations at national conferences. We have identified twenty-five conferences related to either pharmacy education or pain and palliative care at which we will present at least six posters. We hope that our individual reports will lead to either a journal supplement or a series of articles. The next step will be to seek support (not necessarily financial) from professional organizations, to incorporate this information into their curricula. Note: For more information on the Summit, go to http://www.siue.edu/pharmacy/pain/conference_info.shtml
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