Creating our future: A prologue to our next 100 years

American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education,  Fall 1999  by Penna, Richard P

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Traditionally, an epilogue rounds out a presentation or document, it forms the concluding statement and provides opportunities for the reader or listener to take additional meaning from the presentation. The preceding narrative speaks for itself as an articulate and lucid history of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. This epilogue resulted from combining this history with the views of an observer of more than thirty years of the events just described to produce a viewpoint of what we may expect in the near future.

However, it is not merely a prediction of the future. The future is simply too important to predict. We must create it. Predicting the future implies no action other than waiting for it to happen. Create is an action word; it is proactive; creating requires planning, energy, and hard work. It entails exhilarations and disappointments; it involves tracking trends, using available data, planning strategies, and aggressive action. If there is one fact that this history conveys, it is that our leaders of the past were firm believers in creating their futures (our past and present). We must continue that tradition.

As we set out to create our futures, it is critical that we be aware of the lessons from our past. We must move into our futures with a clear understanding of the path we have traveled and the way in which we have changed over time. Our history provides that framework and opportunity.

OUR CONTRIBUTIONS

A reading of our history reveals an elaborate evolution of the three traditional contributions that higher education makes to society--(teaching, scholarship, and service. AACP began as an enterprise devoted primarily to teaching. Later, we recognized the critical importance of science to our cause and we made science a major portion of the curriculum. Many of our faculty began to contribute to and advance their sciences. We give credit to our early faculty for creating the pharmaceutical sciences, for they are what make pharmacy a necessary component of health care. Today, with the renewed interests in herbal products and nontraditional therapies, our scientists' early contributions in natural products chemistry serve the profession and pharmaceutical education well.

AACP's contributions to teaching have been no less impressive. Many of us remember the beginnings of clinical pharmacy when faculty members began to teach students at the patient's bedside. These service contributions spread into the nonacademic setting and formed the basis of clinical pharmaceutical services and the practice philosophy of pharmaceutical care.

Another of academic pharmacy's contributions to the profession has been our leadership. Our history reveals that academic pharmacy led the way for advancing the education of pharmacists, sometimes in the face of opposition from the practice element of the profession. The Association adopted the baccalaureate degree as the entry degree into practice while practitioners opposed it. Academic pharmacy launched clinical pharmacy and created the educational basis for clinical pharmacy to take root within practice. While the doctor of pharmacy degree was introduced by academic pharmacy, the Association refused to adopt it as the entry degree (despite practitioners' encouragement) until it was assured that the curriculum needed to prepare graduates to provide pharmaceutical care required the rigor and length of a doctoral degree.

Creating our futures requires that we devote the time and energy to assure that we not only value our academic contributions, but also expand upon them. Our teaching certainly will change in its nature and scope, but our fundamental responsibility to facilitate learning remains. If anything, faculty members will devote more attention to their responsibilities as teachers in the Association's next 100 years. This will demand that we expand our research and scholarship in education.

Similarly, we must continue to expand our research enterprise in the pharmaceutical and clinical sciences. The current attention on the efficacy of therapeutic interventions, including drug therapy, will continue into the future, which will create opportunities for pharmacy faculty to develop research programs in outcomes and pharmacoeconomics. Finally, pharmacy faculty contributions in service will continue to benefit the public and the profession as faculty initiate services in expanding areas of health care. New therapeutic entities will be discovered that will require unique skills and close monitoring. Pharmacy clinical faculty will create these services and in the process provide frameworks for other practitioners to follow.

NATURE OF OUR GRADUATES

The type of practitioner that we produce has changed over the past 100 years. Initially, our curriculums were designed to educate graduates who could prepare drug dosage forms that were elegant, safe, accurate, and stable. That objective changed as the pharmaceutical industry grew and assumed the role of drug product manufacturer. We began to educate pharmacists to manage the supply of potent, dangerous, and expensive drug products in order to assure the public a safe, accurate, efficient, and potent drug supply. Now, as robotics and computers are introducing efficiencies into the drug inventory management responsibility, pharmaceutical education is once again changing the nature of the practitioner it is producing.