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College of Pharmacy student Cassie Harrison. |
On Friday, Oct. 24, College of Pharmacy students will perform diabetes, blood-pressure and cholesterol screenings at Baker’s Supermarket, 888 S. Saddle Creek Road, from 9 to 11:30 a.m. and from 1 to 4 p.m. That activity follows two weeks of providing flu vaccinations at several Baker’s around the Omaha community.
In addition, pharmacy students will travel to Aurora on Saturday, Oct. 25, to perform health screenings at the Aurora Apothecary pharmacy, as part of the Healthy HEARTland Project. The UNMC chapter of the American Pharmacists Association-Academy of Students of Pharmacy (APhA-ASP) began Healthy HEARTland screenings in 2002. As part of Healthy HEARTland, students perform screenings for high blood pressure, diabetes, osteoporosis and high cholesterol. (HEART stands for Health Education Across Rural Towns). The screenings in Aurora will take place from 9 a.m. to noon. The Aurora screenings are the second of six that will take place in greater Nebraska this school year.
“The benefits of providing these types of services are two-fold,” said Cassie Harrison, a third-year pharmacy student from Papillion. “One, the people in the community will have access to some very valuable screenings that could detect potential life-threatening diseases. Two, these activities show the types of services that pharmacists can provide.”
A third-year pharmacy student, Harrison is president of the APhA-ASP chapter at UNMC. She said that in addition to providing various health-care screenings, pharmacists also are patients’ best resource for information about medications.
“When a patient keeps the pharmacist informed about the prescription and nonprescription medications being taken, the pharmacist can monitor the patient’s treatment and help guarantee a healthy result,” Harrison said. “We are educated to do much more than stand behind a counter and dispense medications, which is what the traditional view of a pharmacist has been.”
UNMC APhA-ASP chapter members and members of other student groups are recognizing National Pharmacy Week with several on-campus activities. A proclamation of National Pharmacy Week will be read at noon on Monday, Oct. 20, at the College of Pharmacy Building.
In addition to the various screening activities during the week, members of the APhA-ASP will be involved in giving flu shots to employees of UNMC and its hospital partner, The Nebraska Medical Center, through APhA-ASP’s Operation Immunization project. That project has garnered the chapter national recognition during the past few years. In 2002, the chapter received the Regional Operation Immunization Award from the APhA, for advancing the pharmacy profession and protecting the public health.
Harrison said that patients should expect a high level of service from today’s pharmacists.
“Pharmacists can do a lot to ensure the health of people who take medications,” Harrison said. “Some of the medication-counseling services we can provide include drug regimen reviews, drug interaction checks and side-effect monitoring, and we can coordinate patient care with physicians and other health-care providers.”