What were your overall thoughts from this year’s ISOPP 2023 conference?
Overall the conference was engaging and very informative across a variety of topics. The opening session on burnout generating compassionate discussion and set the tone for a close community and meaningful networking for the duration of the conference. The session provided practical and accessible practices for building resiliency for yourself, your colleagues, and within an institution more broadly.
The concurrent sessions covered three distinct streams of learning: research, clinical, and fundamentals. These streams facilitated the ability to focus your learning on a given category with a broad range of topics within that theme or diversify your learning based on your personal learning goals. This structure also fostered highlighting sub-themes across the entire conference as well which gave attendees a broad range of interesting learning opportunities.
What themes did you take away from the conference that are already influencing your practice?
There were a few sessions related to recognizing community oncology care gaps (“Engaging pharmacists in a breast cancer survivorship shared care model in the community” and “Cardio-Oncology: new challenges for clinical oncological pharmacists) and the role that pharmacy teams can play in closing these gaps through collaboration across transitions of care that mirror patient flow in the ambulatory oncology setting.
In my ambulatory practice, I strive to proactively communicate and collaborate with my community pharmacy colleagues but these two sessions broadened my view on what clinical situations would lend themselves such cross-setting collaboration. In my practice supporting patients with prostate cancer this new approach is continuing to evolve in relation to hypertension management/optimization for patients with treatment-induced and pre-existing hypertension.
At the poster sessions, I had the opportunity to form an interesting and lasting connecting with two pharmacists (from UK and Australia) around establishing an international program of research to explore the novel role of pharmacy teams across such ambulatory and community practices. We hope to have more updates for the CAPhO community on this topic by next year’s conference in Moncton!
Mike Leblanc, a CAPhO member, gave a great presentation on practice models and the role of cpKPIs and metrics in establishing and evolving new practice models for pharmacy teams in the ambulatory setting. This session was highly relevant to the work happening in Canada related to establishing ambulatory oncology clinical pharmacy key performance indicators (AOcpKPIs). I currently track my informal version of AOcpKPIs and I am applying insights gained from Mike’s presentation to what I track and how I analyze the data and apply the themes. I was able to hire a summer research student, Hayley Underhill, to work on a research project to characterize the practice model evolution of my clinic, as informed by the collected AOcpKPIs supported by the Quality Improvement framework of Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycles.
Can you tell us about your experience as a CAPhO ISOPP Travel Grant recipient?
Being an ISOPP travel grant awardee was an incredible and professionally transformative experience. Attending an international conference provided unparalleled opportunities to network and build relationships with pharmacists from across the world, gain insights into similar practice challenges, and explore unique and novel solutions to problems that others have successfully implemented that may be applicable to challenges you face in your own practice.
The experience of learning in a new language (via in-ear translation services) gave me early (and admittedly superficial) insights into the experience of persons who do not speak, as their first language, the language in which learning opportunities are offered. I will bring that experience into informed inclusive approaches to learning going forward.
Applying for the ISOPP travel grant award, as supported by CAPhO, was a seamless and straightforward process. The team at CAPhO and Sea to Sky were supportive and accessible through the process of navigating the booking of conference and travel related reimbursable costs (travel: air or ground, accommodations, conference registration). I would encourage anyone interested to apply to the 2024 conference in Australia! Ways to strengthen your application could include submitting a poster to the conference and having an idea of how you will use the learning from the conference to enhance or innovate within your practice, program, or institutions processes or care services. Good luck to next years applicants! Don’t hesitate to reach out if I can be a support or resource in any way; Lauren.Hutton@nshealth.ca.
I want to say a huge thank you to CAPhO, the awards committee members, and Sea to Sky for this incredible opportunity. For more insight into my experience and learnings from the ISOPP 2023 conference in Seville, Spain you can listen to the CAPhO podcast coming out in June 2023 on this topic.