Address of the President-elect at the 2018 AACP Annual Meeting

I am deeply honored and privileged to serve the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy as president in the coming year. AACP has been very important to me since the beginning of my academic career. In my very first year as a faculty member, I was fortunate to attend the AACP Annual Meeting as a faculty delegate, and that is when I decided to make AACP a priority. As a new academician, I saw the potential for personal growth and professional development in the association.

As a profession, pharmacists are actively addressing the changing health care landscape by being adaptable and forward-thinking. AACP works to impact the direction of academics, pharmacy, and patient care by advancing the practice of pharmacists in all patient care settings. Much has been accomplished, but much is yet to be done. The ability to do this and to achieve our goals within the academy and across our profession is going to require strong leadership skills among our membership and within the profession as a whole.

My leadership learning opportunities have made me passionate about ensuring that these experiences are widely available and deeply embedded across the academy. This passion underlies the primary theme for my presidential year – leadership skill development availability for all members of the academy.

Whether an individual holds an administrative title or not, leadership skills are invaluable for every position in a school. We want to establish a culture of leadership with opportunities for faculty to aim toward administration or to lead from within as faculty members. In a recent conversation with Barbara Wells, past AACP president and my predecessor at Ole Miss, we termed this: “Faculty Champions – those who elect to ‘lead from within’ in our schools and colleges.”

President Wells also led the development of our Academic Leadership Fellows Program, which has brought tremendous success to its participants, their institutions, and to AACP. We want to build on that success and broaden these types of opportunities.

Faculty who take lead roles in processes such as curriculum transformation and advancement of clinical services, often without a title, serve our programs as these “Faculty Champions.” Each and every member of a school can impact the triad areas of faculty responsibility – teaching, scholarship, and service. The academy should provide the training for these faculty efforts as part of our leadership development portfolio.

The pharmacy academy has made some amazing strides in developing growth opportunities and support for faculty. My goal is to take our successes in faculty leadership and development to new heights, in conjunction with overall faculty wellness. We need programs that will provide access to readily available resources that can broadly impact faculty across the academy. These initiatives will provide the basis for our leadership development objectives, along with continued focus on our strategic priorities. Successful implementation of our Strategic Plan, which addresses significant challenges for the academy, will require outstanding leadership skills.

Throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate to have the support and encouragement of very important mentors and great colleagues. (Presentation photos: Special thanks to Bob Blouin, Arthur Nelson, Bob Yokel, Vic Yanchick, George Spratto, Lois Margaret Nora, Cindy Raehl, and the late CAB Bond.)

I’ve also been affiliated with great schools that have greatly impacted my career: Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Northeast Ohio Medical University, University of Mississippi, and a very special mention to my alma mater, University of Kentucky.

I have been especially blessed to have the staunch support of my family throughout the myriad opportunities I’ve pursued in my career. (Presentation photos: Special thanks to my wife Loree, my sons Drew and David III, my dad David D. Allen, my brother Jim Allen, my uncle Robert R. Allen [“Uncle Bob”] and my late mother Barbara D. Allen.) Please join me in welcoming my family who have joined us today: my father David, my brother Jim, my sons Drew and David, and my wife Loree.

The support of all the people and schools I’ve just mentioned – and the outstanding support of my university administration, my faculty, my staff, and my students at Ole Miss – will continue to guide me during the cycle of my AACP presidency.

To succeed in advancing leadership across schools and colleges of pharmacy, we need to expand our focus on leadership development. In addition to the ALFP activities, we need to find ways to facilitate leadership development training on a broader scale and at a lower cost, so that schools without the required resources can participate.

The association is fortunate to have a Leadership Special Interest Group and three active councils. Council of Deans and Council of Faculties chairs Evan Robinson and Dan Brazeau have appointed a joint working group co-chaired by Toyin Tofade and Andy Traynor.

Their group will create an inventory of current leadership development programs that have proven successful for pharmacy or other health professions faculty. They will identify gaps in such programming that need to be addressed. Armed with this information, AACP will work to create new educational resources to contribute to the training and developing needs of leaders so that all faculty can be successful in the advances we seek, in practice and in the academy.

And we are, of course, fortunate to have our Leadership Development SIG members to call on as we embark on this work.

The work of the 2017-2018 Strategic Planning Committee to update our Plan, which will come before the House of Delegates on Wednesday for approval, will guide the activities of our association this coming year. It was a privilege to serve as chair of this committee during my president-elect year and I pledge to remain laser-focused on implementing the plan to achieve needed progress in key areas.

The first strategic priority remains increasing the number of applicants to pharmacy programs and maintaining a competitive applicant pool. The pipeline is the lifeblood of each and every school. Also, we must consider the diversity of our profession at every turn, from applications through to the job market. The profession and public health as a whole will benefit from a diverse pharmacy workforce.

These goals must be combined with a re-branding of the profession, which is currently being rolled out in our partnership with other national pharmacy organizations as part of Strategic Priority 2. Our communications agency, RP3, will present an overview of the campaign, including the research that informed the messages, in a session tomorrow afternoon at 3:30.

The success of our strategic initiatives will require strong leadership and we must do all we can to ensure we promote these skills across the academy to implement these key priorities.

We can accomplish the goals of our Strategic Plan through the work of the association. During the year ahead, I am asking that our standing committees and all working bodies within AACP strive to identify how we can advance leadership development in all areas of our organization.

Before I discuss the work of our standing committees, I want to announce the formation of a special ad hoc committee focused on the cultivation of leaders for volunteer roles in AACP. This committee will work to elevate leadership by clarifying ways that we can identify and diversify our potential pool of candidates, and by defining the responsibilities and time commitment of, and pathways to, leadership roles within AACP. The Leadership Development Committee will be chaired by Steve Cutler from South Carolina.

The Academic Affairs Committee, chaired by David Gregory, will study the leadership needs within the academy required to stimulate the educational transformation articulated by the 2017-18 Academic Affairs Committee. This will include resource requirements, professional development needs, and cultural change leadership strategies to produce learner self-awareness and lifelong learning commitments in colleges and schools of pharmacy. The committee will specifically focus on defining leadership and other competencies essential for faculty in 2020 and beyond to promote wellness for themselves, their colleagues, and learners in health professions education.

Past President Peggy Piascik will chair the Argus Commission this year. The commission will examine the practice leadership offered by federal pharmacists across numerous agencies. This will include the US Public Health Service, Veterans Administration, Indian Health Service, Bureau of Prisons, and Area Health Education Centers (AHEC), to name several. The commission’s goal will be to study our historical relationships and how they contributed to practice innovation, and to identify how AACP might expand academic partnerships with our federal partners.

The Professional Affairs Committee (PAC) will study the roles and needs of clinical educators (faculty and preceptors) in leading practice transformation. Chaired by Philip Hall, this year’s committee will build upon the body of work of several of our last PACs and strengthen AACP’s relationship with preceptors as a new membership group within the association. AACP has launched a search for up to three Preceptors of the Year from each member school to receive a complimentary two-year membership. Submission information is in the meeting program. The themes of leadership development, clinician well-being, and resilience are threaded into this committee’s charges as well.

Jim O’Donnell will lead the Research and Graduate Affairs Committee that will examine competencies and professional development needs of post-graduate research scientists, with a focus on the leadership skills needed to build and sustain successful, innovative, and high impact research programs. Important elements of this committee’s focus will be assessing how existing leadership development programs by AACP and other organizations are used by our members and identifying unmet needs for new programs.

The Strategic Engagement Committee will explore faculty leadership and development as it relates to their active participation in strategic engagement, or advocacy-related activities. With leadership from Diane Ginsburg as chair, they will work to identify successes and barriers in this space and provide tools for faculty and/or schools, including implications for faculty advancement through promotion and tenure. Their report will include case studies in successful practices they identify at member institutions.

The Student Affairs Committee will examine institutional leadership models, such as the roles of assistant/associate deans and professional staff, and professional development needs to optimize achievement of AACP Strategic Priority #1 on the applicant pipeline. Successful recruitment strategies and leadership development practices that improve student recruitment outcomes in terms of volume, yield, and/or diversity will be priorities. Jennifer Williams will serve as this committee’s chair.

I hope you will agree that these are challenging and timely charges that will collectively provide AACP and our members with numerous pathways to refine and amplify the leaders within each of us. Constant change and uncertainty in health care, higher education, and society in general means that we cannot rest comfortably on the past.

You will hear the term “leadership” a lot from me and AACP throughout my term as president. That is because I know there are leadership seeds in each and every one of us. Some have already taken root and produced bountiful results. Others may need further nurturing. The work of our committees – which are leadership development opportunities in and of themselves – will provide substantive recommendations for AACP and our members to grow the talent we need for the present times as well as our bright and exciting future.

Thank you for your attention and for your support of AACP in the year ahead. Have a great Annual Meeting and enjoy Boston!

• © 2018 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy