Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine Story Archives - Page 2 of 2

New Marshall Pharmacy to Serve Multiple Purposes

Patients of Cabell Huntington Hospital have a new option for getting their medicine. The Marshall Pharmacy that will provide Marshall Pharmacy Students a new learning environment.

The new pharmacy located on the first floor of the Marshall University Medical School at Cabell Huntington Hospital will serve multiple roles for students and the community. Brian Gallagher is the Director of Pharmacy Services for Marshall Health.

“A lot of pharmacy school students graduate from school and they’re disillusioned because they get out and learn all these great things and they get out and they’re in an environment where they’re not allowed to fully practice all the things that they learn in school,” Gallagher said. “We want to try to change that and make it so pharmacy students are able to be fully integrated members of the healthcare team and this gives us a laboratory to be able to do that.”

The effort is a collaboration of the School of Pharmacy, Cabell Huntington Hospital and the MU Health program. The pharmacy was established to do multiple things, to provide Marshall Pharmacy Students an outlet for real life experience, to change the face of pharmacy and provide another option for patients. Gallagher said the learning atmosphere is important.

“The trick with healthcare reform was everyone was trying to do two things, increase access and quality and decrease costs,” Gallagher said. “How can you do both at the same time? One way is better using the underutilized and most successful, best prepared health recourse in the system and that’s pharmacists, if we can get pharmacists better managing disease states over long-term, we’re going to save money and increase access at the same time.”

As part of their pharmacy school education students are assigned to local pharmacies for learning experiences, but now there is a new option. Part of that learning experience is to revive part of the old-school pharmacy experience, to teach students how to consult with patients. According to Gallagher, most pharmacies these days don’t practice the model of consulting with patients on drugs they’ve been prescribed or medicines they should take for particular issues.

“Hopefully students can take what they learn here and they can tell community pharmacists about it and we can help community pharmacies retool their practices and there are a lot of pharmacies that want to do that, in the big corporations to the little chains and the independents want to be able to get there, but making the transition is difficult,” Gallagher said.

Gallagher said the proper implementation of the new techniques could lead to a medical field that is less concentrated on always seeing a doctor anytime there is a slight problem. He said with more and more people acquiring insurance this could be a key way to slow things down.

What Is Canalization?

Marshall University professor Vincent Sollars recently received a $432,000 grant from the National Cancer Institute for his unique cancer research. It involves something called canalization.

Dr. Sollars is an associate professor in the Marshall University School of Medicine. He’s taking an unusual approach to find better treatments for cancer.

“In the end what we’re looking at is making life better for people that have this deadly disease, that’s the main reason I became a scientist,” Sollars said.

The idea of canalization is that as cells develop and mature they become different things.

“As they develop they start as very immature cells that look like each other, and then they mature,” Sollars said. “That process is structured and they’re pushed a long a certain direction like a canal pushes water.”

And he said when that canalization does not work appropriately that is when cancer cells develop. Sollars is examining is why some of those cells do not follow the path and end up becoming cancerous. Sollars said that some of the cells will stop listening and cooperating with neighboring cells. That communication with the other cells is necessary for the complex mix that becomes the different cells in our body. When the cells do not listen, bad things happen.

“The loss of this canalization is a force that will allow those cells that are normal to become cancerous, if we understand how that occurs we can develop new chemotherapies,” Sollars said. “If it is truly a force that helps a cancer cell progress we can put breaks on that force.”

Sollars and a team of student researchers will the test the role of canalization in the maturing process of cells and cancer development in mice. They will target leukemia specifically with this grant, but the results can apply to all cancer types. Sollars said most often with cancer research, the examination is of the genes that mutate and become cancerous. His work differs because it looks at the process those individual cells are taking in becoming a normal part of the body or cancer down the road.

“What I’m doing is understanding not a particular gene, but a process,” Sollars said. “So how do cells bring about the changes in these genes, not the specific genes themselves, but the process and so this is a fundamental process is my theory that most cancers use to progress.”

Sollars says ultimately the hope is that if his hypothesis can be proved true, a certain type of chemotherapy could be used in conjunction with the already occurring treatment of leukemia. He says often times the initial treatment of leukemia will seem successful, putting the cancer into remission. But often he said cancer cells will be hiding and growing without the knowledge of the doctor until it’s too late.

Sollars hopes to hire 8 undergraduate and graduate students along with a full-time technician.

High School Students Experience STEM Fields at Marshall

High school students from all over the region were on Marshall University’s campus this week taking classes in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.

As part of the Health Care Pipeline Initiative, Marshall University was this year’s host to high school students from around West Virginia and Kentucky. Among the sessions the students attended were classes on Pharmacy.

The students learned how to mix compounds to create drugs using a mortar and pestle. The activity was to show what it was like to mix and prepare drugs into the product we purchase in capsules at drug stores. It was just one of many activities the students took part in during the week-long experience. Students took part in classes on:

Pharmacy
Engineering
Health Informatics
Rural Health
Computer Science
Safety Technology

The camp was sponsored by the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, the Marshall University School of Pharmacy and Bluegrass Community and Technical College in Lexington, Kentucky.
Charlene Walker is Vice President of the office of Multiculturalism and Inclusion at Bluegrass Community and Technical College. She said the students have to realize they are depended on to lead.

“We want them to be able to step up to the plate to take a leadership role, to understand as Americans they have a duty to be what we need,” Walker said.

She brought many of the students with her from Kentucky. They are part of a program for underserved high school students at Bluegrass Community and Technical College. She said it’s important that students know what goes into each of the jobs on a day-to-day basis.

“They only see what’s up front, they don’t get the big picture of all the behind the scenes things that have to take place in order for you to get that pill and so these students especially when they were involved in the engineering yesterday, they saw different aspects of that, that they had really never thought about,” Walker said.

Shelvy Campbell is assistant dean for diversity at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine and the Marshall University School of Pharmacy.

“The hope is that they’ll take away everything that they learn and that they utilize that to help develop, so that they can then decide what’s best for them,” Campbell said.

Keith Burs will be a senior at South Charleston High School in the fall. He said taking part in the program was important to him because he someday wants to be a pharmacist.

“I feel like I can influence my community in a positive way and make them feel like I’m giving back and I want to help people and pharmacy is a good way to do it,” Burs said.

It’s the inaugural year of the program on Marshall’s campus.

College Students Visit Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall

College students from all over the region visited Marshall this week to find out if the field of medicine was meant for them.

That’s Chuck Clements, he’s a doctor in family medicine at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. He’s also the instructor for a Wilderness Medicine program that according to med school officials, was the only one of its kind at inception. He taught many of the techniques he teaches in a med school class to undergraduate college students from around West Virginia and Virginia. Students from Bethany College, Concord University, Marshall, Shepherd University, the University of Charleston, West Virginia Wesleyan and Hampton University in Virginia were there. Clements said there techniques that anyone in medicine should know.

“We’re citizens of the community and once you put the white coat on you never take it off and your neighbors and your friends all know what you do,” Clements said.

Clements said there they use the same techniques that any med student would learn in a classroom setting, but it’s about putting students in a setting where all the usual materials aren’t present, thus forcing them to be creative.

“We need to give students an opportunity to learn how to take care of people when they’re away from all their toys that they have in the office, so we give everyone an opportunity to learn some basic skills that they can use when they’re out playing and doing things with their friends,” Clements said.

They learned things like splint building and the unique ways required to stop the bleeding in an extremity when in the woods or on top of a snowy mountain top. Hunter Cutlip is a native of Clarksburg and a student at Shepherd University.

“You learn so much just from hearing everybody’s story, things you don’t even think about as far as residency or what you might do through school or what to expect or kind of how to manage time. It’s been quite the experience, I’ve learned a lot,” Cutlip said.

The fifteen participants also took part in classes that prepared them for the MCAT test. They also learned how to prepare a suture and what it’s like to be involved in the hands-on simulators that are involved in clinical laboratories. Cutlip said he’s not sure of the exact field of medicine yet that he wants to go into, but this experience at Marshall has definitely paid dividends.

“Not anything specific, but I would like to do something with surgery, but I don’t have anything as far as schools or residencies or anything like that, I’m trying to keep my options open and that’s one of the things that I’ve learned at the camp as well, you always need to be looking forward, depending on where you are and your rotations and all that you can be surprised so I’m trying not to make anything to concrete,” Cutlip said.

Jennifer Plymale is the director of the Byrd Center for Rural Health and associated dean of admissions at the school of medicine. She says it is definitely about encouraging students to attend the Marshall medical school, but also that if you’re interested in medicine you don’t have to leave the state.

“It’s a wonderful recruitment effort, but it’s also a retention, if we can get these bright young people in the state of West Virginia to come and stay in West Virginia to do their medical school training and then go on to participate in a West Virginia residency program, we are more likely to keep them in the state,” Plymale said.

This is the second year of the summer academy.

Marshall School of Medicine Approved for Psychiatry Residency Program

The Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine announced Thursday they have been approved to start a psychiatry residency program. Marshall’s program will become only the third in the state to train the specialists experts say the region desperately needs.

Administrators at the Marshall University School of Medicine see substance abuse as just one of many problems the new psychiatry residency program can impact. Dr. Suzanne Holroyd is the new chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral medicine.

“There is a huge underserved need for substance abuse training at all levels including psychiatry in this state and so our residents are going to get a wonderful treatment in that,” Holroyd said.

The school of medicine has been awarded initial accreditation by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education to offer a psychiatry training program beginning in 2015. The ACGME is the national body responsible for post-doctoral training programs in the U.S. Holroyd said with more psychiatrists in the region, problems like substance abuse can be better handled.

“They’ll be learning very specific things about diagnosis and treatment in specific psychiatric illnesses, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, panic disorders, eating disorders, substance abuse disorders, all of which are huge problem that have a huge economic and social and functional impact on the community and families and individuals,” Holroyd said.

Holroyd said there is a lack of psychiatrists not just in the state or region, but throughout the country. She said the program like this could help the region start to catch many of the problems at the beginning, when patients are young.

“There are so many issues for children, depression, bullying, eating disorders, stress and all kinds of things, ADHD and again our residents will be learning all those kinds of information and specific diagnosis and treatments, because ideally it’s best to treat people while young and be preventative if possible,” Holroyd said.

The psychiatry residency will be a four-year program that will begin recruiting Year 1 residents in the fall of 2014 for training beginning July 1, 2015. The residents will do their training at seven sites in the area including Cabell Huntington Hospital, Marshall Psychiatry, Mildred Mitchell Bateman State Hospital, Prestera Center for Community Mental Health, River Park Hospital, St. Mary’s Medical Center and the Huntington Veterans Affairs Medical Center, all of which are located in Huntington.

Dr. Joseph Shapiro is the dean of the School of Medicine.

“If you think about the general health of the community, the problems of substance abuse, of obesity, metabolic syndrome, these things all go hand-in-glove,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro said the development of a solid psychiatric program can mean better healthcare all around.

“Even though many of the issues that we’re talking about are handled by our primary care providers, the training of these providers can be done more optimally if we have a robust psychiatric and behavioral sciences group,” Shapiro said.

Marshall will be the third psychiatry residency program in West Virginia, joining West Virginia University-Morgantown and West Virginia University-Charleston Area Medical Center.

Researcher Shows Elderly Struggle During Power Outages

A professor of geriatrics at the Marshall University School of Medicine recently published an article that shows the elderly struggle when the power is out.

Dr. Shirley M. Neitch is a professor of geriatrics in the department of internal medicine at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. She, along with a team of researchers, just published an article on the effects of prolonged power outages on the health care of elderly patients. The study was published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Geriatrics. Neitch said although the premise seems obvious, many times elderly and especially bedridden elderly aren’t ready for the outages.

“If you ask specific questions, do you have a week’s worth of your medications, would you evacuate if you were told to do so, would you know where to go if asked to evacuate? You find out it’s not 100%, they are not really ready,” Neitch said.

And she said that’s the scary part for those providing care to geriatric patients.

The study highlighted two cases following the 2012 derecho that left millions of people without electricity for days across much of the mid-Atlantic United States. The excessive high humidity and sweating led to an increase in moisture on the patients’ skin. Without power it was difficult for caregivers to keep them clean and dry because of the lack of air conditioning and heated water. Both patients later died and their situations during the power outage were believed to have played a role.

Neitch and her team of researchers say their studies show the need for continuous power service for bedridden patients and overall awareness of opportunities for elderly when outages occur. Neitch said most power companies offer a high-priority restoration status, but documentation must be completed with the assistance of health care providers. She says even then, depending on the situation, having a high-priority restoration status is not a guarantee that the power will be back on anytime soon. Neitch says more elderly need to make use of the 211 Call Center System and the Vulnerable Needs Registry. The 211 system will allow the elderly and their caregivers to locate services that are needed. Neitch said it comes down to a need for better coordination of services.

"There is no need to reinvent wheels," Neitch said.

“My hope for the larger community is that people that are doing some really good and really hard work out there trying to make us all better prepared for this can start talking to each other because there is no need to reinvent wheels,” Neitch said.

The Vulnerable Needs Registry, available in 9 WV counties, requires a survey be completed for the patient, and makes sure there is a record of what the patient needs when an emergency occurs. Neitch said she just hopes this brings more attention to something that is near and dear to the hearts of many. As part of the study Neitch and her team produced a Patient Tip Sheet as well.

The study notes that the Vulnerable Needs Registry is only available in Cabell, Boone, Jackson, Lincoln, Logan, Mason, Mingo, Putnam and Wayne counties, unlike the 211 Call Center System, which is available nationwide.