One week into distribution, pharmacies have a familiar request: We just need more vaccines localnews8.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from localnews8.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
February 18, 2021
Third-year pharmacy student Shannon Patterson administers the first dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine on a health care worker.
By Connie Young, College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
Vice Dean of External Relations Linda Garrelts MacLean started seeing a growing demand for pharmacy students in April 2020, just two months after the COVID-19 pandemic officially kicked off in the US.
First came the requests by public health officials for students to help at COVID-19 testing sites. Soon, the need for student pharmacists and their skills in being able to communicate with patients and knowledge in administering vaccines became a bright spot in a very challenging year of virtual learning.
Several University of Montana pharmacy doctoral students have helped administer hundreds of COVID-19 shots this month as part of their Operation: Immunization project. The students have been scheduled to help with vaccination clinics using the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
The students had already been trained and certified as pharmacy-based immunizers in the initial weeks of their 4-year pharmacy doctoral degree. Marketa Marvanova, Dean of the Skaggs School of Pharmacy, said in a news release, We enable our students to have a lot of experience in vaccinations, and that is an attribute that has allowed these wonderfully passionate students to be a critical force in managing COVID-19 locally. Providing immunizations is a way to contribute the knowledge, skills and abilities of our students and the greater profession of pharmacy, to become part of the solution.
Chairman Casey and members of the House Health and Human Services committee:
My name is Courtney Joslin and I am a Resident Fellow for the R Street Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization whose mission is to engage in policy research that supports free markets and limited, effective government. I lead R Street’s research on state policies for birth control access, with a focus on sensible deregulatory efforts such as pharmacist-prescribed birth control. I appreciate the opportunity to elaborate on how other states have safely increased access to effective family planning methods with this model.
To date, 17 states and Washington, D.C., now allow pharmacists to prescribe hormonal birth control. While first available in Oregon in 2016, the pharmacy access model has been studied for its safety and ability to increase birth control access for over a decade. A 2008 trial study in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association found that almost all
Pharmacists are hot commodity as U.S. ramps up COVID-19 vaccine rollout By Megan Cerullo COVID-19 vaccines being sent to pharmacies
The urgent need to administer COVID-19 vaccines across the U.S. is stoking demand for another suddenly hot commodity: pharmacists.
The federal government this week began shipping vaccines to drugstores around the country as part of an effort to jump-start immunizations. As a result, pharmacies are adding pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and other support staff to deal with patients, manage vaccine supplies and give shots. Some employers are even offering five-figure sign-on bonuses for pharmacy students even before they complete their studies.