Call to Order
Chair Virginia (Ginger) Scott (West Virginia) called the Council of Faculties (COF) Business Meeting to order at 2:08pm California Ballroom, Second Floor, Westin Gaslamp Quarter
Introductions and Comments
Chair Scott began by welcoming everyone, reviewing the agenda and introducing other members of the COF Administrative Board including John Bosso (Immediate Past Chair; South Carolina), David Zgarrick (Chair-elect; Northeastern), Cecilia Plaza (American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy [AACP] Staff) and Dana Hammer (Secretary; Washington).
Report of the Secretary
Dana Hammer reported that the minutes of the 2011 COF Business Meeting held February 28, 2011 in Savannah, GA, were available via download from the AACP website. The minutes were received and approved.
Report on Board of Directors Activities
Immediate Past Chair Bosso reported that highlights of the AACP Board of Directors meeting:
• Gerry Romano was hired as the new AACP Director of communications Financial update by COO Dan Cassidy and Treasurer Keith Herist. Association’s finances are in good health. Assets are continuing to grow. The number of schools in PharmCAS has increased. The new contract with our PharmCAS vendor is based on revenue sharing rather than a fixed cost model. This change has proven to position the Association in a stronger position despite the dip in designations.
• Data collection for membership needs analysis is still open with a web based survey
• AACP President-elect Lyle Bootman, a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), helped facilitate an IOM fellowship for pharmacists (new for pharmacy). There will be an endowment created to support this position. Applications will be accepted and the first fellow will be named later this year.
• New framework for AACP policy agenda Advocacy continued for pharmacists provider status.
• The Board has approved the revision of the CAPE Educational Outcomes and the revision process planning is underway.
• The impact factor for the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education continues to rise. New initiatives related to the journal are being undertaken such as redesigning the website
• Updates were given on the following initiatives;
◦ Assessment and Accreditation Management System (AAMS)
◦ Faculty recruitment/retention
◦ Experiential education
◦ Global pharmacy alliance
◦ Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) Institute
• New Investigator Award – in the first year of the reinstatement of the program there were 130 eligible applications for 18 awards. Announcement of recipients will be made soon.
Final Quorum Report
There was not a quorum with 36 members from 32 schools present (46 schools is quorum).
Committee Updates
1. Faculty Affairs committee – Chair Scott reported the committee is chaired by Bernard Sorofman (Iowa). The charge was to recommend strategies to improve faculty worklife. They have conducted a thorough literature review and considering conducting a brief faculty survey.
2. Resolutions and Standing Rules Committee – Chair Scott reported that Rules and Resolutions Committee Chair Susan Winckler has been waiting to see if there are resolutions coming out of any of our committees. Chair Scott recommended that any members of COF can bring forward a resolution to the COF board.
3. Nominations Committee – Nominations Chair John Bosso reported that there will be a special election in the spring for the position of COF secretary for which the slate was almost finalized. The slate for the Chair-elect designate will be presented at the Business meeting in July for the November 2012 election.
4. Council of Faculties (COF)/Council of Deans (COD) Joint Task Force on Professionalism – Chair Scott reported that Wendy Duncan from COD and Bob Soltis (Drake) from COF are co-chairs. The committee is drafting a report based on institutional and leadership in schools to promote cognitive moral development of students. They are describing 5 to 6 categories of recommendations, and will bring forth policy recommendations for the COD and COF.
Old Business
Legislative Update
William (Will) G. Lang, AACP Vice President for Policy and Advocacy – Lang encourages COF members to think about how their activities (teaching, research, and service) are reflected in the policies and issues he reported on.
• Patient-centered outcomes research institute: Vincent Lau empanelled a group to comment on the proposed research agenda, which will be forwarded to the group that is planning this institute.
• The Ad hoc group on medical research will assess academic pharmacy’s impact on the salary cap implemented by National Institutes of Health (NIH).
• Lang worked with the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) to address the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s effective health care portfolio to include pharmacy in community emergency response teams (CERTs), and to work with the joint accrediting group as a way to disseminate this portfolio.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on pharmacy outreach program -- This is CDC’s initiative in medication therapy management to reduce cardiovascular deaths and includes a CE module about hypertension medication adherence. This is the CDC’s first recognition about using pharmacists.
• US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – using Integration of Science of Safety Report – this should be revisited on our campuses to explore interprofessionally. Our access to information needs to be used to better work with patients, exchange health information, and determine how health professions education can help meet this need.
• Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) innovations Request for Proposal Health Innovations Challenge program. Hopefully several pharmacy schools will be selected.
• President Obama released the budget today (2/13/2012) – NIH funding was maintained, but HHS budget was reduced by 10 billion. This will affect the CDC and some of the programs that pharmacy is involved in.
• Financial aid officers met and dual degree programs will make financial aid applications very tricky. It is important that financial aid officers be included in these conversations.
• National Consumers League “Script your future” was an opportunity to employ team-based care and there was great participation from pharmacy schools.
• The February issue of Health Affairs is about diabetes, and need for use of evidence-based interventions. There is more action needed and less development of models. It was good that they mentioned the use of pharmacists to improve diabetes care.
Lang ended by encouraging COF members to continue to share with him our information about their teaching, research and service as “evidence” in the development of public policy. This information is very important in AACP’s ability to educate and advocate our legislators on our behalf. Cecilia Plaza echoed this suggestion and described meeting with a White House staffer about what is happening in pharmacy education, which is grounded in higher education theory.
Chair Scott noted that Vincent Lau, Chief Science Officer, gave his report to Cecilia Plaza to share during the COF Business Meeting.
• The number of New Investigator Awards increased from 15 to 18 awards for each award cycle. Elected leaders from Council of Sections appointed the panel of reviewers. Uniform criteria were used to review the applications from all disciplines. Special advisory committee on research and graduate affairs met. They suggested a new research fellows program that would be modeled similarly to the Academic Leadership Fellows Program (ALFP).
• He has established communications with those responsible for research and graduate education in schools of pharmacy.
• He visited 8 schools and attended several national and regional meetings
• A web portal for prospective graduate students to use to look at the variety of programs available in United States and Canada is currently being developed.
• He is working with Danielle Taylor (AACP Research Manager) to collect data about funded research grants.
New Business
Emerging Issues
Scott asked COF members to comment on any issues that were raised during the Town Hall meeting (eg, open membership, admissions traffic rules).
AACP President Brian Crabtree also encouraged members to share their opinions on these issues, bring forth resolutions, and look forward to the development of the research fellows program. Resolutions can be sent to Ginger Scott or Susan Winckler.
Michael Hogue (Samford) – there is value in having to pay for membership and AACP is a good deal compared to some pharmacy practice organizations.
Sandy Zito (St Johns) – where is the evidence of the benefits of going to open membership? Will it help meet the Association’s goals? He would like to hear more. President Crabtree responded that we need to hear more from the membership, especially faculty. Chair Scott responded that open membership could help the Association to say it is speaking for all pharmacy faculty, not just members.
Hogue noted we needed to make sure that professional staff have a role in the organization which might be a somewhat different conversation from the open membership. Zgarrick responded that there is a task force reviewing the organizational structure of the Councils, SIGs, and Sections. The task force has identified that there are a number of professional staff roles that can become involved (eg, financial aid officers) but not necessarily in leadership roles.
Bosso commented that the Board has not necessarily endorsed this plan. The benefit of open membership is inclusiveness. There are many non-faculty types who share in the education of pharmacy students who could have a home in this Association.
Chair Scott noted that the Association wants to make a decision about this issue by the annual meeting.
Justin Tolman (Creighton) – stated that any decision about admissions traffic rules should be made by the House of Delegates (HOD), and not necessarily a section or SIG.
Ginger Scott clarified that this will go before the HOD. Plaza further clarified that those policies would have to go first to the Policy and Bylaw Development Committee before going to the HOD. So not necessarily does the section or SIG create all the language for potential policy.
Open Mic
Justin Tolman (Creighton) – his faculty is concerned about the impact of the expansion of pharmacy schools on quality of applicants and programs. ACPE is not regulating the expansion outside of its maintenance of the standards.
Bob Beardsley (Maryland) – as current president of ACPE, he noted that there is an article coming out in the Journal of American Pharmacists Association soon from Lucinda Maine and Pete Vlasses that shows data about the quality of applicants and programs. The AAMS system will allow for greater depth of data collection to answer these questions. Indicators thus far are that there are no differences in quality of graduates.
Chair-Elect David Zgarrick (Northeastern)
Chair-elect Zgarrick sought feedback about potential theme for his term from the COF membership. He will put out a call for volunteers – likely via a web based portal that members can access. He would like to have his committees established by the meeting in July. The theme he is thinking about for his term is career transitions. Examining, what kinds of transitions exist (eg, promotions, moving to a different school, going from faculty and to admin and back)?, what resources do members need to make transitions more smoothly?, and what transition points exist? Some items identified included:
• motivating students to become faculty members (there are resources from AACP to help with this)
• identifying our colleagues with potential for administrative type positions
• issues of mentorship in following a career path, and communicating what faculty positions entail
• going from being an administrator and going back to the faculty
• after you get your clinical practice set up then transitioning to reaching out to patient advocacy groups
• how to better develop our clinical faculty’s skills in teaching and research (scholarship of application, scholarship of advocacy), and academic service.
• developing clinical faculty into an academic administrators
• organizational transition such as transitions in leadership
• moving to a different school
Adjournment
Chair Scott adjourned the meeting at 3:25pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Dana Hammer, COF Secretary
- © 2012 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy