While planning this semester’s pharmacy leadership course, two University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC) professors landed on an unexpected way to bring policies and laws to life for the third-year students: Launching an advocacy podcast series.
The Student Script, scheduled to release this week by the Pharmacy Frontiers podcast, consists of a series of short student-produced episodes on advocacy issues shaping pharmacy, including provider status, pharmacy benefit managers, and substance use disorder treatment.
UMKC pharmacy professors Taylor Steuber and Heather Lyons-Burney said they wanted students to understand the issues well enough to explain them, succinctly, to a general audience.
“When they get out into practice, they’ll know all these great clinical things that they learn in all the courses. But we wanted to hit home with some of those things that are going to impact their ability to practice,” said Steuber. “And so that's really where the advocacy piece comes in.”
Lyons-Burney worked with Daniel Good, past president of Missouri Society of Health-System Pharmacists and co-host of the Pharmacy Frontiers podcast, who spoke with the students about ways to synthesize complicated policy issues to hold the attention of someone who doesn’t work in pharmacy. It’s a skill many of the students will use next month as they gear up for Legislative Day at the state capitol.
“With an advocacy topic, you have to research it, you have to get your information, you have to be able to articulate it,” said Lyons-Burney. “And think about walking into a legislator's office. You may not even get five minutes.”
ASHP encourages members of every Student Society of Health-System Pharmacy (SSHP) to participate in policy and legislative advocacy, offering resources to help students get involved — from implementation toolkits and webinars to Legislative Day visits.
“As future pharmacists, students must play an active role in shaping the profession, particularly amid a rapidly changing healthcare system,” said Deanna Tran, ASHP director of member relations.
UMKC students Kamden Boyd and Ethan Billups said the podcast advocacy assignment was unlike any they had ever completed for their pharmacy studies.
“I did not expect that I would be ever tasked with that in pharmacy school,” said Boyd, who worked on an episode about pharmacists performing test-to-treat services. “But I'm glad that we did it. I think it gave us the opportunity to get a good perception of how we sound to an audience. Like, how can we really catch their interest? It really brought out some soft skills that we don't normally get to exercise.”
Billups, who worked on an episode about pharmacists’ role in substance use disorder treatment, said he believes he could use what he learned about distilling an important advocacy issue when he participates in Legislative Day.
“What I took out of it was okay, you need to take this big legislative issue and cram it into, you know, a five-to-eight minute timeframe,” he said. “So it was about how well you can summarize information into a conversation, because anyone could be listening to this.”
Good, the Pharmacy Frontiers podcast co-host, said the students arrived at their microphones “with well-researched topics and a modern familiarity with social media. Podcasting and media relations is not a core component of the pharmacist training curriculum, so this project within the leadership and innovation class is a fun way to learn and practice some skills that are easy to implement when in practice.”
