The back-and-forth tweeting began when a pharmacist expressed frustration that pharmacy needs a collective voice. He’s at the point, he said, where he wants to see results instead of tilting at windmills. As long as community pharmacists don’t see a benefit, he said, APhA won’t get their support or membership dollars.

Representing us, Tiffany responded that if community pharmacists decline to participate, they leave themselves out of our processes to determine the priorities and policies for the Association. Lack of participation is what weakens and fragments our voice.

Tiffany continued that some recent big steps for pharmacy include FDA being open to considering a new drug paradigm, APhA being a resource for the U.S. Senate Community Pharmacy Caucus, and public support from the U.S. Surgeon General for provider status. Yet the years of hard work from APhA and our colleague organizations that went into building support and relationships with policy makers are largely invisible.

In the end, this pharmacist expressed a wish to just write a single check that would give him a voice.

“I suggest picking 1 or 2 [pharmacy associations] and committing. Perhaps a state and a national,” Tiffany tweeted. “We all do work together, even if it’s not obvious. Of course, my pitch is for the national you pick to be us. :) But the important thing is to get and stay involved.”

Let me elaborate on this Twitter exchange. I frequently talk with pharmacist audiences, and I’m not bashful about asking them to join and support APhA as their voice for the profession of pharmacy. There are many worthy organizations in pharmacy, each making great contributions to our collective cause. I personally belong to two state pharmacy associations and three additional national organizations. I know I might be considered a little biased, but I think it’s important to support the special missions of these other organizations, while (for me at least) staying focused on APhA’s primary mission to promote pharmacists’ services. If you believe pharmacists have an important role in health care, you need to belong to APhA!

It is true that most pharmacists have limited funds to spend on memberships, so it’s easy to say APhA competes with each of the others, and then to assume that the competition for membership dollars gets in the way of collaboration. But it doesn’t! I can honestly say that collaboration among national and state pharmacy associations has never been more positive, at least in the 30 years that I’ve been hanging around this environment. Those who say the Profession, with a capital P, isn’t working together are simply misinformed and laboring under outdated misconceptions.

We’re very proud of the collaborations we’ve built with our colleague organizations, and we will continue to nurture them. And we’re not just keeping to ourselves in Pharmacy. We’re working on stronger relationships with Medicine too. All in the best interests of good patient care. It’s a simple truth: when pharmacists get involved in patient care, quality goes up, and costs go down.

There will always be strife and divisiveness. There will always be dissatisfied professionals in all professions. That dissatisfaction is to be taken seriously and used to promote change. I will always listen to negative feedback, but I’m not going to buy into negativism. We are on the right path. Pharmacy is no longer “at a crossroads,” as I’ve heard said for decades. We have a vision for patient care that includes us, and we’re going to stay focused on achieving it. I hope you’ll join us.

I also spoke at the Rho Chi Society induction ceremony that evening. Here’s how I concluded my remarks:

Pharmacists are blessed with training that gives us a wide range of career options. The profession needs you to stay connected and involved. You are part of something bigger than yourself in pharmacy. You must innovate if we want to achieve our full potential in a system that values our patient care contributions. Our patients are waiting.

In general, the message was that today’s students must innovate and negotiate if we are to assume the roles we’re working so hard to create. And, together, we can do that!

Our partnership with LearnSomething began in early 2011 to leverage the strengths of the two groups and stake a claim in the ever-changing landscape of REMS. The APhA team working on this initiative includes Liz Keyes, Liz Cardello, Kristen Binaso, Shelby Englert, Maria Gorrick, Pete VanPelt, and Marcie Bough.

The website’s first two activities are REMS 101 and REMS 102 continuing pharmacy education activities. As new REMS are required by FDA, the partnership hopes to work with the manufacturers to distribute their REMS education on the website.

The website is hosted by Silverchair Information Systems, the company that has served APhA so well with our innovative PharmacyLibrary.com. In addition to displaying for JAPhA subscribers and APhA members the contents of the printed issues of the Journal, the new JAPhA.org has, or soon will have, the following capabilities:

• Personal accounts for all users, including APhA members and those with access through institutional subscriptions
• Customization of page views by dragging and dropping page elements
• Enhanced online presentation of articles and continued availability of PDF files
• User submission of monitored comments (online) or letters (for publication)
• Links to social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
• Simplified views of the website when viewed from mobile devices and tablets, with reminders of recently viewed content when the user returns to a larger computer screen
• Feeds of current news from pharmacist.com, APhA DrugInfoLine, and FDA
• Display of related content from both JAPhA.org and PubMed
• Display of articles recommended by the editors
• Presentation of collections of JAPhA articles for commonly covered topics
• Downloading of citations for EndNotes, Reference Manager, and other such programs

Hats off to the JAPhA editors and APhA staff who have worked on this conversion for the past year. Doug Ried and his team of Associate Editors provided excellent guidance and feedback during the process. Karen Tracy and Michael Posey led the project team internally. Joe Sheffer and Carli Richard of Periodicals, Chris Baker of Internet Services, Irica Cheeks of Marketing, TuNia Slade of Membership Operations, Wendy Ding of Information Technology, and Pat Massenberg of Member Services did yeoman’s work in seeing this effort through to completion. Thanks, everyone!

Today, Team APhA watched great theater from atop our headquarters as the space shuttle Discovery flew over the Washington Monument and rest of the National Mall on its way to a new home at the National Air & Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport near Washington.

I was offsite for a meeting but received tweets, photos, and phone calls from excited folks who were watching the historic event in person. As someone from a generation that watched the U.S. enter space, orbit the Earth, put men on the moon, and stretch the boundaries of our existence, today’s event rekindled many great memories for me.

With the landing of Discovery, a major chapter in U.S. aviation comes to an end. Yet we know it’s not the end of the book on space exploration. It will be interesting to see how the privatization of space exploration develops. We have to manage priorities with limited resources, and hard decisions need to be made. I’m not second guessing the politics of it. I just recall an old saying, “You can’t get to second base without taking your foot off first.” Unless we continue to explore, we’ll never expand the human race beyond the Blue Marble.

The article does a nice job of describing how pharmacists and technicians dilute or ration doses from stronger concentrations or short supplies of medications. However, the article totally misses the practice that some hospitals and Pharmacy Compounding Accreditation Board–accredited pharmacies employ to address shortages: They compound lifesaving medications from bulk active ingredients that may be readily available for compounding by qualified pharmacists.

There are regulatory barriers that challenge us—as I write in my upcoming editorial in the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Compounding—but it’s clear that pharmacists are solution oriented, if given half a chance.

In the coming months, as we continue our pursuit of this goal, you can bet we’ll be pulling from the report and Dr. Giberson’s comments. Our pursuit of provider status will head in many directions, and we’ll need your help. This will be a heavy lift. Are you willing to write, visit, show up, give for a sustained period of time? This won’t happen overnight, but with friends like Scott Giberson, we’ll all be a little more motivated!

The writer, Scott Gottlieb, is a physician who used to work at CMS and FDA and now works at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC. I thought his letter was balanced, measured, and thought provoking. It struck a chord with me. How about you?

What is not as often discussed is how those changes in community pharmacy also present us with opportunities to explore new avenues of community pharmacy practice models. If dispensing is the function of the past for community pharmacists, let’s work towards identifying and defining the functions of our future.

In other words, change is inevitable, so look for ways to make it positive. (As a fellow redhead, I was pleased to resonate with that wisdom.)

In that spirit, at an important FDA hearing yesterday, I provided APhA’s comments to FDA on a proposed paradigm change for nonprescription drugs. In short, we see FDA’s proposal as an open door to opportunities for pharmacists, but only if we embrace change as positive and find new ways to collaborate on the health care team.

While we provided oral comments yesterday, our full written comments will not be completed until May 7. So your thoughts and comments to us will be most appreciated before then. What do you think?