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.