The Board of Pharmacy Specialties (BPS) voted during its meeting earlier this month to issue a call for petitions from interested parties in the pharmacy practice areas of infectious diseases and cardiology. The decision to issue the call for petitions is based on information derived from role delineation studies completed in 2013 by BPS-assembled task forces as a result of preliminary requests to consider these areas by ACCP and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP). The full text of the BPS announcement is available at http://bpsweb.org/news/Call_for_Petition_Cardiology_and_Infectious_Diseases.pdf.

As with recent successful petitions to recognize several of the existing BPS-recognized specialties in pharmacy practice, ACCP expects and intends to work with interested organizational partners in these specialized areas to submit petitions for consideration by BPS. ACCP also remains engaged as a member of the Steering Committee established by BPS that is examining the current and future framework for specialty recognition. As noted in the BPS news release, that work will continue concurrently with the announced call for two new petitions.