Women’s involvement in clinical trials: historical perspective and future implications

Interprofessional (IP) practice and education are important when seeking to respond to the growing demand for primary and preventive care services. Multiple professions with synergistic expertise are needed to effectively provide health promotion, disease prevention, and patient education and to help patients with multiple comorbidities, chronic health conditions, and care coordination. A recent study by Schor et al. titled, “Multidisciplinary work promotes preventive medicine and health education in primary care: a cross-sectional survey,” compares the implementation of preventive services in three primary care models. Higher rates of health services, patient education, and health outcomes were documented in two different models of care involving persons in multiple professions when compared with independent solo physicians’ practices. In this commentary, we focus on the value of IP team-based care, continuing professional development, and the impact of the team on practice performance and health outcomes. Key components of effective IP teams include using consistent terminology to describe the team composition and function, team structures with purposeful selection of professions to address gaps in care, leadership support, and IP continuing professional development and education.

Pharmacists play key roles in public health activities. The Healthy People initiative is a future-oriented approach to promote health and prevent disease, and serves as a framework for priority areas of intervention. The latest iteration, Healthy People 2030, was released in August 2020. Healthy People 2030 contains 355 specific objectives and raises awareness about gaps between actual and optimal health status. Pharmacists and student pharmacists can directly impact the majority of the objectives to improve the nation’s health. Pharmacy educators should utilize resources including the Clinical Prevention and Population Health Curriculum Framework to ensure they are adequately preparing their students to affect clinical prevention and population health.

The objective of this Review is to characterize content related to global health in didactic and experiential curricula of doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) programs in the United States. The review was completed through a systematic website search of 133 US PharmD programs accredited or currently in the process of obtaining accreditation to identify global health dual degrees, minors/concentrations, required and elective courses, and experiential opportunities. Programs’ course catalogs were referenced as needed to find more specific course listings/descriptions. More than 50 programs offered an elective course related to global health; eight had a required course; eight offered a minor or certification for global health; three offered dual degrees in pharmacy and global health. Fourteen institutions had a center for global health studies on campus. More than 50 programs offered experiential education opportunities in global health including international advanced pharmacy practice experiences or medical missi...

This article describes the history and evolution of pharmacist-physician collaborative practice agreements (CPAs) in the United States with future directions to support pharmacists’ provider status as the profession continues to evolve from product-oriented to patient-centered care and population health. The pharmacy profession has a long history of dispensing and compounding, with the addition of clinical roles in the late 20th century. These clinical roles have continued to expand into diverse arenas such as communicable and non-communicable diseases, antimicrobial stewardship, emergency preparedness and response, public health education and health promotion, and critical and emergency care. Pharmacists continue to serve as integral members of interprofessional and interdisciplinary healthcare teams. In this context, CPAs allow pharmacists to expand their roles in patient care and may be considered as a step towards securing provider status. Moving beyond CPAs to a provider status would enable pharmacists to be reimbursed for cognitive services and promote integrated public health delivery models.

The overarching goal of public health is to advance the health of individuals, communities, and populations