What do any of you current pharmacy students think of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy? Would you or would you not ever consider joining this organization? Why or why not?
www.accp.com
www.accp.com
Accp?
- Thread starter Katrinka
- Start date
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2006
- Messages
- 197
- Reaction score
- 1
Katrinka said:
Sorry I am not a pharmacy student, but would like to add some of my opinions if it is ok. When I was a student I really didn't know too much about ACCP (at least not until 4th yr), but in retrospect I wish I would have. I know they are in the process of increasing student involvement, but I guess looking back on pharmacy organizations the pharmacy schools themselves do a little too much "force feeding" of the two main organizations (i.e. ASHP or APhA). APhA and ASHP are both great organizations, but are often too big to really get a feel for the organization on a personal level. Secondly the type of publications in the journals really gives you a better idea of how much you can do w/ the PharmD. By this I mean whether you are into ambulatory care, inpatient activities, research (outcomes or benchwork) Pharmacotherapy (journal published by ACCP) provides a much wider range of topics to read about when compared to AJHP (by ASHP) or the JAPhA (by APhA). FYI...Annals of Pharmacotherapy is also good to read as well.
However not that everyone should have to be all about the literature but reading the journals just helps give the student better insight into their profession. Secondly ACCP provides much better search engines for pursuing residency training and/or jobs options (clinical, academic, industry, etc). Secondly they also offer various career development tools/CE programs/online lectures which can be taken online at your own pace for CEs and at an affordable price. So in an effort to try to make this a shorter post, I like ACCP and would encourage any student to join if for no other reason to expose yourself to different organization w/i your profession. APhA and ASHP are just really big organizations and the smaller organizations (ACCP, NCPA, ASCP, CPNP (College of Psych and Neuro Pharmacists)) tend to offer a more focused approach on the options your profession provides. At least that is my two cents.
- Joined
- Jan 20, 2006
- Messages
- 40
- Reaction score
- 0
I would tend to agree. I'm a second year PharmD student and a current member of ACCP. From a student's perspective, the major flaw with ACCP is that they don't have a student oriented membership, although they're moving toward that. Pharmacotherapy is a great journal... I've kept all of my copies for future reference. One of the benefits of membership is that you can join professional list serves where pharmacists of a certain specialty can submit questions to an email list serve and their colleagues can reply with their knowledge and/or experience. While its interesting to see whats being talked about in practice (I'm on the Pediatrics list serve), sometimes the information is beyond your realm of knowledge, so all you really get is a flooded inbox. I have saved all of the emails though, because most of the pharmacists use a "signature" at the end of their emails, and I like to see where pharmacists are practicing Pediatric Clinical Pharmacy - possible future career pursuits. It may even be as simple as to say that ACCP is more interested in quality over quantity, whereas other pharmacy organizations (who shall remain nameless) rank quantity over quality.
