Outreach & Engagement Programs and Scholars Database

The Office of Continuing Professional Development within our School provides continuing education opportunities to healthcare professionals. In AY 2022/2023 their CE programs attracted 67,900 users from 12 countries including the United States. Faculty engagement is a unique strength of the SoP. A part of outreach focuses on media engagement, translating scientific advances to the public at large, and combating misinformation. In an assessment of the UConn School of Pharmacy versus competitors in New England, UConn School of Pharmacy is the first in the “reach” of media work across the globe (Meltwater assessment for AY2022 and AY2023). When compared against the top five schools of pharmacy nationally, SoP were the first in reach in AY2022 and second in AY2023, even though the school is much smaller in size. SoP had a reach of over 1.1 billion people including articles in Newsweek, national NPR stations, MSN, CNBC, hundreds of national newspapers, and online media sites. Pharmacy Practice remains the top producing department of articles in The Conversation at UConn as well. SoP faculty were major supporters of the Office of Health Strategy (OHS), the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS), Department of Public Health (DPH), Department of Consumer Protection (DCP), and Department of Developmental Services (DDS). We have ongoing collaborative research grants with DPH and DMHAS, distributed education and hundreds of DMHAS provided naloxone opioid overdose kits and fentanyl test strips at health fairs and at Middletown Pride. We ran the Connecticut Cannabis License Lottery program. One of our faculty is on the Institutional Review Board for the DDS. This year we reached out to the commissioners of DPH, DMHAS, OHS and are looking for more ways to engage with them moving forward. We also had a panelist at a CDC/Alzheimer’s Association Dementia Risk Reduction Summit. Student engagement through service learning is a required component of experiential education within the Pharm.D. curriculum. The School helps to organize and facilitate student participation in several signature Service Learning projects, including interprofessional primary care and health screening clinics, which provide free health care and screenings to underprivileged communities across the state, immunization clinics to protect CT residents from infectious diseases like influenza and covid-19, and health fairs to provide education on a variety of health topics to member of the public. During AY22/23, pharmacy students participated in 50 primary care and health screening clinics in 7 different locations, 5 large scale health fairs in Storrs/Mansfield, and over 200 immunization clinics in 33 locations across CT.

Contact: C. Michael White

Email: charles.white@uconn.edu

Keywords: Continuing Education, Pharmacy, Mental Health

Website: https://pharmacy.uconn.edu/department-of-pharmacy-practice/educational-outreach/