The following was originally posted by Hannah Tandon to the University of Nebraska Medical Center Division of Infectious Diseases blog.
We’re excited to feature a recent publication borne from student-faculty collaboration that highlights the importance of interdisciplinary care!
Dr. Jordan Broekhuis, the lead author, is one of our former HIV Enhanced Medical Education Track (EMET) students who is now a surgery resident at Beth Israel Deaconess. He completed his EMET work here at UNMC under the mentorship of Drs. Sara Bares and Susan Swindells. Their paper, “Midwest pharmacists’ familiarity, experience, and willingness to provide pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV,” was published in PLoS One in November. We recently talked to the authors about their work.
Could you give us a short summary of your work and what motivated you to conduct this study?
Pharmacists in Nebraska and Iowa were asked to complete a survey to gauge their familiarity, experience and willingness to provide HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). PrEP is underutilized and pharmacists could potentially play a role in expanding access to PrEP providers, especially in states such as Nebraska and Iowa where regulations support the implementation of collaborative practice agreements which allow for the delegation of responsibilities from the collaborating prescriber to the pharmacist.
What were some of your key findings?
While respondents had limited familiarity and experience with PrEP, most indicated a willingness to provide PrEP if given the opportunity to do so via a collaborative practice agreement and after additional training.
What do you see as future directions for this research and pharmacist education around the use of PrEP?
This survey laid the groundwork for implementation of a pharmacist-led PrEP (P-PrEP) initiative here in Omaha. We shared preliminary results of our P-PrEP project at IDWeek 2018 and hope to disseminate the final results soon.
You can read their full article here. Interested in learning more about UNMC’s EMET program? See our features of current and former EMET students and read more about the program here.
PWeekly