The World At Your Fingertips
Start at home.
Invite an exchange student
to come see your hometown, your school, and your profession. Ask them everything you can think of--about
their hometown, their school, and their profession.
Ponder and smile at the similarities, be stirred and challenged by the
differences. Then share a meal, a laugh,
an adventure. Hug when it is time for
them to go. One day in the future, meet them
for coffee on the other side of the globe.
Start at home.
Look around you and find a
local immigrant community.
Volunteer. Organize a health
fair. Find resources they may be able to
use to develop their health literacy.
Find resources to educate yourself and your fellow professionals about
their culture. Listen. Ask open-ended questions. Keep your heart and mind open. Meet them where they are. Learn their traditions. Share food, laughter, a cultural experience. Realize that you learned as much as you
taught, if not more.
Start at home.
Advocate for your
profession. Become involved in your local, state, and national
organizations. See how much we can
accomplish together as student pharmacists.
Meet a student pharmacist from another country, and be amazed and grateful
for the progressive clinical practice we have in the USA. Help this student develop public health
projects, professional development competitions, or advocacy programs for their
school, or perhaps their entire national student organization. Watch as your advocacy spreads into something
bigger than either of you ever imagined.
Start at home, but you'll
never believe where you will go...
IPSF gives you all of these
opportunities, to work in your local area and in our global community, and
shake the foundations of what you know, as well as to travel and explore the
world of pharmacy.
Possibly you're most
interested in the SEP, a global exchange program run entirely by student pharmacists--providing your local community not only with an opportunity to meet a
student pharmacist (or students!) from all over the world, but also a local
networking experience in organizing and establishing rotation sites for the
visiting student.
Or maybe the Public Health
Projects, organized by IPSF, will not only fit in nicely with many of your
APhA-ASP Patient Care Projects, but also provide you with new ways to expand
your outreach into new directions. You
can use this new focus to to meet the unmet needs of a local immigrant and
refugee community center, work with a local Native American Nation and IHS to
share culture and health knowledge, or to develop a patient care project in
HIV/AIDS or TB.
IPSF and our more local
Pan-American Regional Assembly also provide incredible opportunities to
advocate for the pharmacy profession.
Either through connecting and developing friendships with student pharmacists around the world by attending World Congress or a Regional symposia,
or through a number of opportunities to visit the WHO, World Health Student
Symposium (WHSS), or United Nations (Check out the current application!)--you
can expand your advocacy to a global level.
Our
local IPSF chapter at the University of Washington has grown over the last few
years to start at home, here in Seattle, not only on all of these
opportunities, but also to take full advantage of the city and university
around us. Every year our IPSF officers
take it upon ourselves to promote programs to travel through the UW Study
Abroad office--hopefully sending up to 10 student pharmacists and 2 faculty
members to India this summer on a pharmacy-specific extension of a nursing
program. Even more locally, IPSF chapter
meetings are held as an international health journal club, at different local
ethnic restaurants, entitled "Eat Around the World." We also
joined forces with other organizations on campus: SNPhA, LKS, PhReSH, and IHI,
to host a week of HIV/AIDS awareness activities in early December.
The opportunities are
endless. So let's start at home Region
7. How is your IPSF chapter getting
involved?
Adrian Hughes is a third year student pharmacist at the University of Washington, and is an active member and enthusiast of IPSF. Adrian serves as the IPSF Liaison for the University of Washington's APhA-ASP chapter. Through IPSF, she has had the opportunities to travel to travel throughout India, and last summer she attended World Congress in Utrecht, and ventured through the Netherlands and Eastern Europe. She will be attending IPSF World Congress in Puerto, Portugal this summer.
About The APhA-ASP
APhA-ASP Region 7
The American Pharmacist Association is the oldest and largest professional organization for pharmacists in the country. The Academy of Student Pharmacists is held within APhA and is comprised by student pharmacists throughout the nation who are still taking classes at their respective colleges of pharmacy. APhA-ASP puts a strong emphasis on patient care initiatives, advocacy for the profession, and overall training to become a professional in the field of pharmacy.
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