ePlacebo September Edition

ePlacebo September 2015 Edition

NATIONAL AUSTRALIAN

PHARMACY STUDENTS’ ASSOCIATION

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa .org.au

What’s Inside President’s Report……………………………………………………...…..1 Vampire Cup……………………………….………………………...…..…3 Cricket Scholarship………………………………………………………....4 A QPS-Ace Allied Health Evening………………………………………….5 PhUNE Annual Ball………………………………………………………….6 QUTSPA’s Carnival Ball…………………………………………………….7 CaSPA’s O-Week Celebrations…………………………………….……...8 Healthy Recipe………………………………………………………………9 Mika’s Rural Placement Stories………………………………………..…10 World Pharmacist’s Day…………………………………………………..11 National Student Business Pharmacy Competition………………...12-13 The Tips ‘n’ Tricks of the NSBPC…………………………………....14-16

TAPS Members Chanelle Rolls, Lauren Haworth, Mark Jones and Jenna Leighton accepting the 2015 Pharmacy Guild of Australia National Student Business Plan Competition trophy.

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

President’s Report Dear NAPSA Members, Our annual Vampire Cup is well underway, with all 18 branches participating in this event. It has been great to see so many blood donations coming through so far and we urge students, alumni and friends of NAPSA to go and donate blood before the 13th of October and register your donations with your local NAPSA branch. Every donation goes a long way, saving 3 people in critical need. Grab your friends, family or fellow students and head down to your local Red Cross to support and excellent initiative.

On the 25th of August, students from NAPSA attended the Australian Pharmacy Council (APC) Colloquium with the secret ingredient: can we turn up the heat on experiential education? The event brought together national and international speakers to discuss and at times debate the role that experimental education plays in ensuring new pharmacists are practice ready. The colloquium explored what makes a graduate practice ready as well how these graduates could be supported through their learning journey. The day was also an excellent opportunity to network with other like-minded professionals. NAPSA would like to thank the APC for the invitation and for executing a fantastic day.

On the 17th – 19th of September, NAPSA had a strong presence at Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s Pharmacy Business Network (PBN) conference in Melbourne. The conference was a unique event focusing on providing the industry with tools to improve business planning, leadership, management and profitability. The highlight of the weekend for many delegates was the annual National Student Business Plan Competition finals where three inspirational student teams showcased their innovative ideas to an entire room of industry and business owners. Congratulations to Chanelle Rolls, Lauren Haworth, Mark Jones and Jenna Leighton from University of Tasmania for taking out the top prize. An extended congratulations go to the teams from University of South Australia who came third and the University of Sydney who were the runners up. NAPSA would like to thank the Guild for their efforts towards such a great conference.

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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President’s Report Finally, the exciting time of electing our next four board members is nearing us quickly. For those nominated please do not forget to send in your applications, which close on the 2nd of October. We look forward to completing our board and assisting NAPSA in moving forward.

Good luck to everyone who have exams coming up. Remember Keep Calm and Study Hard!

Hope to see you at Congress! Only 114 Days away!

Eleanna Ballis National President president@napsa.org.au “If everything seems under control, you’re probably not going fast enough.”

Vampire Cup is in full swing in Bendigo with BAPS!

Pharmacy Business Network Gala Dinner with Matt Scott (Vice-President), Sandra Minas (Pharmacy Awareness Chair) and Shefali Parekh (VPSA President)

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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Vampire Cup The challenge has been accepted once again, with all 18 branches doing their part in NAPSA’s Annual Vampire Cup! What challenge is that? You may ask.

Well this Pharmacy Awareness campaign sees each branch go head to head, in an effort to donate as much blood, and blood products as possible. The work endeavoured by NAPSA and its members in conjunction with the Red Cross has been able to increase blood donations immensely, and in doing so saved more lives, as well as raise a greater awareness for the need of these donations.

In 2014, Pharmers’ Society from Charles Sturt University won the most donations and the most improved prize, closely followed by the Tasmanian Association of Pharmacy Students (TAPS) and the Canberra Student Pharmacy Association (CaPSA).

The importance of this blood drive doesn’t go unrecognised and pharmacy students across Australia are playing their part in continuing this amazing feat. Everyone is watching closely with our live tally monitoring the position of each branch as they battle it out for the top place. This year’s challenge ends on the 23rd of October so you can donate today knowing that your one donation saves three lives!

It is amazing being able to witness NAPSA members actively contributing in both raising awareness and donating. Good luck to each branch and know that together we are creating a better future for those who truly need it and filling a prescription that saves lives.

“Fill a life saving prescription. Give Blood.”

Sandra Minas NAPSA Pharmacy Awareness Chair

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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Cricket Scholarship Pharmacy Cricket Inc' is to provide this Scholarship for a student (male or female) presently in any year of a fulltime Pharmacy Degree course or in a Masters degree course.

- Applicants must provide documented evidence of a sound academic record throughout their course or from school, if in their first year of pharmacy.

- Applicants should demonstrate their capacity to provide leadership and their ability to work as part of a team. They should include a prĂŠcis of their involvement in the University and the general and wider community.

- Applicants should outline their current involvement in a sporting activity.

- Applicants must indicate their commitment to work in Community Pharmacy either metropolitan or rural (during pre-reg year & beyond).

- Applicants are invited to briefly (in about 300 words) comment on their perception of the future of pharmacy and how they see themselves being able to contribute to the profession.

- The Application must indicate the way in which the student will use the scholarship funds for personal advancement and to assist with costs associated with their pharmacy course and are requested to report quarterly to Pharmacy Cricket on the utilisation of the scholarship.

There is no requirement to be involved with cricket.

Applications should be posted to: 'Pharmacy Cricket Scholarship' 25 Annesley Locked Bag 2500 Bowral NSW 2576 Applications close on Monday 26th October 2015.

Applications MUST include contact details. (home address & phone contacts).

To obtain your copy of this scholarship criteria please email to Pharmacy Cricket at hodgsong@bigpond.com and we will email you in return Our web site is www.pharmacycricket.com.au.

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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A QPS-Ace Allied Health Evening The Queensland Pharmacy Society Association (QPSA) hosted its very first Allied Health Evening. Guest speakers from various health programs, ranging from (nursing, pharmacy, occupational therapy, optometry, physiotherapy and speech therapy) discussed their chosen profession to various health students. The intention of the event was for health students in hope for them to have a better understanding of the various allied health professions that make up our multidisciplinary system, as well as address any misconceptions they may have about a certain profession. The guest speakers dwelled on their chosen field in great detail and discussed how their particular skill set fit into our multidisciplinary system to provide best possible outcome for patients. The evening was inspired by discussions at NAPSA Congress earlier this year.

Angelo Dela Cruz and Amy Le QPSA Third Year Representatives

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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PhUNE Annual Ball The Annual UNE Pharmacy Ball was held on Saturday 15th August at the historic Booloominbah mansion on the UNE campus. With UNE bosting both internal and external cohorts the ball is an excellent platform to bring us all together.

Our President, Elsie Barnes gave the welcome address thanking sponsors and encouraging students to apply for 2016 NAPSA Congress delegate positions. The Head of Pharmacy Discipline, Professor Ieva Stupans praised the recent growth of PhUNE and thanked the first years for making an effort to attend the night.

Elise Thompson, a recent UNE Pharmacy graduate spoke about her experience as a newly registered pharmacist including gaining compounding accreditation and aid work in Vanuatu. Elise described her experience as a new pharmacist as if she’s a drug in phase 2 drug development, being that she’s still working out how effective she is in her role, determining her therapeutic target and that there is still a long road ahead until she becomes a generic.

Dr Stephen Carter, the PSA NSW Branch President gave an address about UNE’s recent success in the PSOTY and Pharmacy Intern of the Year competitions over the past few years.

Finally, The graduating class presented the pharmacy staff with gifts to show their appreciation and admiration. The Happy Booth was a huge success as expected, resulting in nearly 500 photos! As the night progressed students (and lecturers!) made it out on the dance floor where the DJ pumped out tunes such as ‘Stop’ by the Spice Girls and ‘5,6,7,8’

by Steps taking most of us back to the 90’s.

Overall, the night was a success!

PhUNE Committee

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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QUTSPA’s Carnival Ball QUTSPA’s started this semester off with a bang! Over the weekend we celebrated the best of QUT Pharmacy with our Annual Ball. As with every year, this carnival-themed night was a massive success mixed with magic and music.

This was a great opportunity for our students to network and socialise outside of the classroom.

Continuing along this jampacked semester we’re excited to be holding educational events for our members including First Aid courses, S2/S3 Refresher courses and more!

As we're based at an inner city campus, we’re striving to promote to students the benefits of stepping beyond the campus and out of their comfort zones and taking on a regional/rural pharmacy placement. We’re working together with students who have already partaken in regional/rural placements as well as those who may even originate from these areas and formulating a video to encourage greater participation.

We’re also eager to kickstart Vampire Cup in September! Hopefully we can smash our target and encourage as many participants as possible to each save three lives.

The semester will wrap up in November with our Half Way Mixer which is a celebration of a milestone for our second year students, as well as our Final Year Dinner for our graduating class of 2015. We’re looking forward to celebrating our students' achievements in 2015!

Angelica Lagoda QUTSPA President

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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CaSPA’s O-Week Celebrations With O-Week kicking off, CaSPA took the opportunity to hold our first social event of the semester. Our Nerds & Jocks Pub Crawl was a huge success! Despite the freezing Canberra weather, we had a great turn out thanks to our Social Chair Mel who put in a lot of effort to organise a great event with many establishments offering generous food and drinks deals for our members. All who attended had an excellent night and it was a great opportunity for some of our members to meet each other and socialise for the first, but not last time this semester, as we have many more social and educational events planned!

Alicia Martin CaSPA Publications Chair

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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Healthy Recipe Apple and Berry Crumble with Toasted Muesli

Mix 2 cups of oats, ½ cup of coconut, handful slivered almonds, 10tbsp of coconut oil and bake in oven at 180 degrees until toasted (approx. 20 min).

Meanwhile, slice 2 apples thinly and boil for about 5mins till soft. Drain water and pat with paper towel.

Divide apples into 2 baking dishes and then top with ¼ cup berries (mixed with tsp of Nativa to sweeten) each.

Top with toasted muesli and put in oven for 20mins just top with yogurt

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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Mika’s Rural Placement Stories!

Go rural! But actually do it.

I have recently returned from a stellar week long placement in a rural community pharmacy and what an eye opener it was! We might know pharmacy in the bustling metropolitan areas, but these pharmacies which cater to the majority of Australia’s land mass present entirely unique opportunities, challenges and certainly ways of approaching pharmacy.

Placement has definitely dispelled some of the misconceptions about rural pharmacy I’d always held – like the notion that the work would feel isolating. I found the exact opposite to be true – all the pharmacists are highly connected with each other, as well as doctors, hospitals, nursing homes and aged care facilities. This is a real network and it is extremely inspiring to see how powerful this can be to the patients and the wider community.

Another wonderful aspect about these pharmacies is their unique demographic.

During my placement, I had the chance to speak to people from all walks of life – those who had travelled many miles, those who were just passing through, some from farming property and others who had families and were local residents. To these patients, time can take a different pace and they so value the opportunity to speak to the pharmacy staff.

Ultimately there is much to capitalise on with the broad patient demographic and the chance to build a strong health care network in these areas. If you can undertake a rural placement during your studies – do it! This is a great chance to diversify and learn different ways of tackling challenges in pharmacy to take back to your town or city - and maybe even rural pharmacy in the future.

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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World Pharmacists Day 25th of September marked World Pharmacists day! Our friends at the International Pharmaceutical Students’ Federation and the Asia Pacific Regional Office created a photo competition to capture what the best part of being a pharmacist was. Facebook profile pictures were also changed with the words "Pharmacists; Your Partner in Health”. NAPSA continues to promote the pharmacy profession through PAM (pharmacy awareness month) where each branch decides on a month to carry out this initiative. This year we had VPSA hold a cardiovascular health campaign at their local shopping mall educating the public about the ‘silent killer’ that is hypertension. Numerous branches held information nights that explored different career options for pharmacy students.

The level of engagement during world pharmacist day by our members demonstrated their passion for this profession and their commitment to improve it in any way they can.

Happy World Pharmacist day to all!

Viva La Pharmacie!

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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The Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s National Student Business Pharmacy Competition

A team of bright stars from the University of Tasmania has taken out this year’s Pharmacy Guild of Australia National Student Business Plan Competition.

The winning team of Chanelle Rolls, Lauren Haworth, Mark Jones and Jenna Leighton won with their fictitious “Vitality Pharmacy” which aimed to provide the missing link in primary health care services in their Hobart region, where 20% of the population has no access to a vehicle. Their game changers included increasing access to primary health care through a mobile pharmacy, and improving technology acceptance and usage through monthly technology education sessions for their older customers.

The winners were announced at the 2015 Pharmacy Business Network conference in Melbourne over the weekend. The two runners-up were: • •

PlusCheck Pharmacy – University of Sydney - Winnie Zhao, Pyae Pyae Tun, Jolly Ngo and Aakanksha Jain; and Performance Pharmacy – University of South Australia - Carly Schiller and Samara McInerney.

These three teams successfully progressed through the rigours of the competition which commenced in May, by producing exciting and innovative business plans and then progressing through the quarter final and semi-final rounds to be named the top three teams for 2015.

They had to complete online financial questions, write additional short answer essays about business finance and operations and pitch their business ideas to the judges before being selected to pitch to the PBN delegates and the final judging team.

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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The Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s National Student Business Pharmacy Competition

Following the live pitches, each team met the judging panel to answer some post-pitch questions about their business ventures. All three teams should be extremely proud of their achievements.

The National Student Business Plan Competition is an initiative designed to promote creative entrepreneurship among pharmacy students and encourage the development of viable, innovative, pharmacist-owned community pharmacies.

The competition was open to all pharmacy schools across Australia and New Zealand, and this year’s finalists have risen to the top of the 18 entries received. The competition is an initiative of the Pharmacy Guild of

Australia and is sponsored by Blackmores (principal sponsor), EBOS, Gold Cross Products and Services and Pharmaceutical Defence Limited (PDL).

The support of the competition sponsors has opened many new opportunities for the young pharmacists who have taken part in this competition since 2006. The sponsorship provides $12,000 in cash prizes to the finalists in the competition, half of which goes directly to the participating schools of pharmacy who produce the top three teams each year, as well as the opportunity for the students to attend PBN 2015.

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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The Tips and Tricks of the NSBPC What a whirlwind last 5 months! Yes you read that correctly, we started putting together our original business plan in APRIL! Having said that; funnily enough our team originally came up with the idea in the pool at NAPSA Congress in the Gold Coast on Australia Day this year! We were very proud to be the first team to enter the competition from UTAS (that anyone can remember anyway?) and to even make it to the final was a bit surreal.

We were inspired by Chanelle’s fiancé, a paramedic in Tasmania, who often tells stories of patients they were called to simply because they had run out of urgent medications like insulin or who needed simple OTCs but obviously couldn’t get them at 2am (at least not in Tassie). There had also been some recent research conducted in Tassie about 24hr access to primary health care through a pharmacist which supported our thoughts that this service was needed. Our community engagement idea changed a little before we settled on a final idea which was based around educating the elderly on how to use technology and linking them with a preexisting service where they could rent iPads to better monitor their health with instore devices. A big focus of ours was not to reinvent the wheel so to speak, but rather focus on the research that had already been done, services which already exists and bring them all into one central location; Vitality Pharmacy.

Vitality’s Tips ‘N’ Tricks to help you get through the NSBPC 1. Who are your mentors? Ask your local Guild branch if they know of anyone who would be keen to mentor! Ask your uni, ask your bosses if you work in pharmacy, ask your friends who are studying business, marketing etc!

2. Find a pharmacy in your local area that is about the same size as the specs given, this makes imagining your pharmacy as a real pharmacy a lot easier. We also actually did up an example roster; this helped to visualise the day-to-day function of what staff we had to fill all our roles.

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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The Tips and Tricks of the NSBPC 5. The business plans from the top teams the year before that are on the Guild website are just the initial plans, in the final round teams get a chance to ‘update’ their plan based on feedback they are given. Ours for example, changed a bit based on feedback we were given from previous rounds; we also completely redid our financials.

6. As soon as you have finished reading ePlacebo (how cool is the new look!) go and watch the 2014 videos that are currently up on the Guild NSBPC Info page, they may not be there next year and are useful to watch.

7. Do a proper contents page in your original plan.

8. Don’t be afraid to make a fool of yourself in the elevator pitch. Joe’s advice to us was to ‘Find a hook’ or a phrase that people will remember. Out of our whole pitch ‘Beep Beep’ this was the bit that we had the most people come up to us about afterwards and quote at us. We kid you not, out of 5 minutes of dialogue ‘Beep Beep’ was the bit that people remembered. Oh, and Mark definitely got sick of being called ‘Mark who puts the Mark into Marketing’. An example from the year before was Jess, Jamie and Cyd’s ‘Our brand in the sand!’

9. When you make the final, get as much practice pitching to an audience as possible, we were the ‘entertainment’ at the Tassie Guild AGM Dinner a week or so before and let us tell you, that performance was far from perfect, but a good learning curve.

10.

The investor pitch is scary, when you walk out you have no idea if you smashed it or flunked it.

11.

Have a team member whose Grandma makes the best tomato relish in the world, makes for amazing Team Breakfast Meetings, thanks Nanny Leighton!

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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The Tips and Tricks of the NSBPC 12.

Take the competition seriously, but don’t take yourselves too seriously, in the end it was a lot of hard work, but we also spent a lot of time laughing and enjoying ourselves!

We would like to thank the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, The sponsors; Blackmores, EBOS, Gold Cross and PDL, our mentors – Joe, Peter, Martin and Mike; and Corinne from UTAS for all of her moral support!

Lastly well done to everyone else who competed this year (especially the USYD and UniSA girls), we are sad we only got to meet four of the other teams!

Goodluck for next year!

Chanelle, Jenna, Lauren and Mark, Vitality Pharmacy!

Connecting Tomorrow’s Pharmacists www.napsa.org .au

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