Can you believe HRSA’s 340B Program will have its 30^th Anniversary in November? If you haven’t heard of the 340B Program let us share that this program has immensely grown patient access to our services including medications. Without it, our county would have been financially burdened in finding ways to provide care to a vast population.  Since 1992, Congress extended to safety-net hospitals a relief from high drug costs that Congress provided to the Medicaid program with the Medicaid rebate law.

I walked into the APhA reception for past leaders at the 2022 annual meeting, and with a quick scan of the room, two things were clear. The friend I was there to meet had not yet arrived, and I knew no one else in the room. I was earlier than I’d hoped, and there were fewer than ten others present watching the slideshow rotating through pics of each year’s APhA-ASP national leaders for multiple decades. Raised in the South, I know the social rule that if you’re standing within earshot of someone speaking, you can join the conversation. Tom Worrall does too. He was naming off someone he knew from almost every slide, and he soon began asking me if I knew them too.

Policy is scary! I wouldn’t know how to even start! I’m young and inexperienced, so what would I offer? Why bother? Does it even do anything? How many of us have said or thought any or all of these? We certainly have at one point in our own careers. While the policy process might be new, foreign, or even intimidating to some, consider the incredible impact that can be generated from one effective idea. For example, it was previously very common for pharmacies to sell tobacco products!

The recent conviction of a Vanderbilt University Hospital nurse for the inadvertent death of a patient due to a drug mix-up has sent shock waves through the clinical community and generated significant soul-searching among healthcare workers. While the sentence handed down on 5/13 was three years of supervised probation rather than the maximum of eight years in prison, her nursing license remains revoked, and the criminal conviction remains on her record during probation. The underlying issues that can result in this tragedy include short staffing, training a student or new grad, interruptions, too many noisy electronic alerts, confusing messages, unclear labelling, pandemic exhaustion and more.