Moving into the 2020 fall semester, our chapter was struggling to come up with ways to manage active membership as a result of shifting to a hybrid format, in which some students were able to attend events in person and others were online because of pandemic regulations. In addition to our own struggles with planning events, we noticed that our students seemed increasingly burned out as time went on. Even though our school of pharmacy tried to help with resilience and other stress-relieving tactics, students were struggling to balance taking so many online classes and having to forgo breaks from early August through late November with maintaining personal wellness.
We began thinking of ways our chapter could help students within the school of pharmacy and how we could do so practically while creating content and events our students would actually want to see. Over the summer, some of our board members came across a grant opportunity from the College of Psychiatric and Neurologic Pharmacists called “Defining the Future Grant.” As we discussed various options and the potential of applying for this grant, we developed a wellness and resiliency campaign that our chapter could run in collaboration with our newly formed CNS PRN chair position focused on mental health and wellness.
After drafting an application and plan for this wellness/resiliency campaign for the academic year, our chapter was awarded the grant midway through the fall, and we began implementing our protocol. One of the first steps was encouraging our members periodically through e-mail and social media content, including holding a “Sleepy September” campaign, through which we encouraged students to practice good sleep hygiene and a “Fall into Gratefulness” campaign in November.
As part of this campaign, we also held an outreach event with a similar focus at our local independent pharmacy, CedarCare Pharmacy, where we shared resources with our community about practicing self-care, taking breaks, and getting proper rest while offering health screenings and a flu clinic. We will hold events in the spring specifically aimed at improving our students’ well-being through art therapy. These events will be open to all students in the school of pharmacy and will involve painting and creating artwork in one of our campus art buildings, with a virtual option for students learning remotely.
Our hope with this campaign is to create small pockets of peace in the semester for students going through so much in addition to the busy semester. We were so excited to be awarded this grant, and we’re excited to continue using the funding awarded to benefit our members and other students.
Several of our chapter meetings allowed members to learn from clinical pharmacists while focusing on resilience and wellness within the workplace of specialized disciplines. For example, we hosted a chapter meeting focused on resilience in behavioral health care, where a clinical pharmacist from the Northeast Ohio VA spoke to our members about strategies she used in her daily practice to avoid burnout while working in a field with the potential to be draining if practitioners are not using wellness self-care strategies. Our chapter also hosted a neuro-ICU clinical pharmacist whose job currently requires a great deal of resiliency during the pandemic. He provided us with tips on resilience during APPE rotations as we present patient cases to interdisciplinary teams. We also held a chapter meeting focused on pediatric epilepsy management led by a pediatric neurologist and behavioral health clinical pharmacist, where we learned strategies to more effectively manage medications for patients with diseases refractory to initial seizure treatments.