Sneak Peek to the EAHP Congress Student Programme

Interview with Dr. Tonna 

The special EAHP Congress Student Programme will be held on Wednesday 16 March, 2016 at 14:00-18:00, at the Austria Center Vienna, room Hall L3. One of the hosts will be Dr. Tonna who is currently a Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacy at Robert Gordon University in Scotland. Together with her co-hosts and colleagues Dr. Cunningham and Dr. Edwards, she teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate students and hopes that they can bring this experience to the table when they are facilitating the student session. Dr. Tonna also has a hospital pharmacist background as she has worked for a number of years in hospitals in Malta and in Oxford, UK. As one of the hosts of the Student programme, she aims to combine the two to deliver an interesting and exciting session for pharmacy students and to provide them with knowledge that can be implemented whatever their aimed future work environment.

Dr. Tonna also revealed something else about the student session. Have a look at the questions and answers below and join this interesting session in Vienna! 

1. The topic of the student session this year is "A systematic approach to pharmaceutical care – what is this all about and how can it be implemented by the hospital pharmacist?". Why did you choose this topic?

➢ Pharmaceutical care is the key to delivery of good patient care by the pharmacist, whether the patient is in hospital or in the community. To ensure that patient care is optimised and individualised to the specific patient needs, a number of systematic approaches have been developed. Adopting a systematic approach allows the pharmacist to deliver consistently to a high standard when there are demands for the pharmacist's time.

2. What kind of background should the participants have?

➢ The session will be aimed primarily at students. Newly qualified pharmacists or pharmacists who have just started working in hospital and with limited experience in developing care plans for hospital patients may also find this session interesting.

3. You aim to have an interactive, hands-on approach to the topic. Could you give us some hints what kind of workshop is to be expected?

➢ The workshop will involve an introduction and overview of a systematic approach to pharmaceutical care based on Hepler and Strand's (1990) work. This will be followed by an interactive workshop where participants will work as groups and develop a pharmaceutical care plan for a given patient. For anyone wishing to read around issues prior to the session, the patient that will be discussed has hypertension, osteoarthritis and insomnia. Researching the evidence-based management of these medical conditions beforehand may be helpful since the information is vital towards the development of the care plan which will involve optimisation of the patient's current treatment. Videos and patient cases will be some of the teaching methods used in this session.

More information about the EAHP Congress Student Programme can be found here.

Dr. Tonna Dr. Cunningham Dr. Edwards