I am extremely conflicted about the session I attended today sponsored by the AACP L/ER Section. First of all, because of various schedule conflicts and illnesses, Vern had to scramble to get a speaker for this session at the last minute. Unfortunately I can’t remember her name and I didn’t get her handout I believe she’s an NLM Fellow somewhere in the Chicago area.. .The reason I’m conflicted about this session is that I was hoping for some discussion about how to blend cultural competency and health literacy together in a nice, cohesive instructional package. I know there are schools out there that are doing interesting things with discussing the need for providing consumer health literature to multiple cultural groups – including why you would, how you evaluate them, how to write them, etc. Unfortunately, the speaker largely ran through a very large number of general consumer health sites, with a few drug-specific ones thrown in at the end out of deference to the actual group visiting.. .The other reason I’m conflicted is that I talked to my lab faculty about the session later. We do a lot with cultural competency and health literacy in the lab classes, since their curriculum is a bit more flexible , so can respond to interesting challenges like this one. They were thrilled with the new resources that they’d never seen, and thought the session was really interesting. I guess I need to work on making our website picks a bit more visible.The best part of the session was when Vern led a discussion of what li.aries/schools are doing to teach either/both of these in their professional programs. I would love to be able to gather that discussion and get it up on the wiki. It was really interesting to hear about other programs. For instance, one school has their non-native English speaking TAs – many of whom are from East Asia – do a role play with their groups. In the role play, the TA plays the role of the pharmacist while the students have to get information about critical diseases that they contracted while travelling a.oad. It was apparently a total eye-opener for the students when they “got” how much verbal interaction is necessary in pharmacy consultations. How cool! I would have liked to hear more things like this.. .It’s clear that I like going to conferences to .ing back practical ideas to implement at the li.ary and the school. Luckily, I usually at least get that through conversations with my faculty and the li.arians here.. .Also today I went to a session on mapping informatics into the pharmacy curriculum. Every year they do a session, every year some li.arian gets up to note that they ignore us, and every year they ignore us again. It’s really frustrating! And then there was the editor’s meeting for the Basic Resources List. The Section business meeting went pretty well. We gavelled in Vern as Chair, Sue as Chair-Elect, and myself as Secretary. A whole new year!
