The Rho Chi Society
Annual Chapter Report
Annual Chapter Report - 2016
Date of report submission: May 10, 2016
Name of School/College: Sullivan University College of Pharmacy (SUCOP)
Chapter name and region: Delta Kappa; Region IV-E
Chapter Advisor: Kim Elder;
Delegate who attended the Rho Chi Annual Meeting: Sarah Raake
Date delegate’s name submitted to Rho Chi: March 1, 2016
Past year’s officers and e-mail addresses:
President: Emily Kurtz;
Vice President: Mary Burgess;
Secretary: Evan Lawson;
Treasurer: Casey Humes;
Historian: Kasey Burge;
New officers and e-mail addresses for next academic year:
President: Emily Jones;
Vice President: Brianna Combs;
Secretary: Madison Vaughn;
Treasurer: Marina Shcherbakova;
Historian: Kathryn Bandy;
Number of Rho Chi student members at college or school:
Class of 2016: 20 members
Class of 2017: 16 members
Meetings
Date / Attendance / Agenda / Action Steps05/05/2015 / All Members / Brainstorm event ideas; promote Chick-fil-A lunch; promote Rock-a-thon / Mary and Casey to finalize orders to Chick-fil-A lunch; Emily K to conduct vote on ideas for events; Emily K to select two members to create poster for Rock-a-thon
6/09/2015 / Therapeutics Committee / Discuss using online tests or apps to send out Therapeutics Reviews. / Nearpod and ExamSoft are not viable options for sending out reviews. Chelsea to send out each review in two different formats.
09/01/2015 / Officers / Plan initiation ceremony; schedule officer elections for new members / Mary to finalize total amount owed to UL Golf Club for initiation ceremony; Emily to send out invitations to Rho Chi faculty members
10/15/2015 / Officers and Prospective Members / Informational session outlining Rho Chi’s purpose, mission, vision, and the benefits of joining to members of class of 2017 invited to join Rho Chi. Officer elections for class of 2017 took place. / Explain responsibilities of officers and committees; identify Rho Chi’s role within SUCOP; describe events held by Rho Chi; outline purpose, mission, and benefits of joining Rho Chi
11/24/2015 / Officers / Finalize bank account access for new officers; schedule next officer and general meeting; schedule meetings for upcoming quarters / Emily Wimbec to schedule all officer meetings 2nd Tuesday of every quarter and to schedule all general meetings 4th Tuesday of every quarter
1/12/2016 / Officers / Review bylaws; discuss fundraising ideas; confirm delegate for annual meeting; review the year’s events and whether to continue; discuss new ideas for volunteer-work relevant to our organization mission / Host pasta bar lunch at school to raise money; continue to plan annual blood drive on campus; continue work with Portland Promise Center; All officers to read article describing idea for “Night Against Procrastination”; invite speaker to Wednesday lunch to discuss fellowship
1/26/2016 / All Members / Brainstorm fundraising and event ideas; signup for committees; gather interested individuals for committee heads and Individual Tutoring Coordinator / Set date and assign dishes for pasta bar fundraiser; set requirement to plan 1 event (any category) per quarter;
4/14/2016 / Officers / Recap of events: pasta lunch and tutoring; future events (Blood drive, Non-procrastinating event, Tutoring, Camp quality);
Fundraising ideas and minimum amount needed; schedule chapter meeting; discuss grant application; graduation cords / Consider moving pasta lunch to fall quarter; Bri to fill out post-event form; consider hosting salad bar lunch in winter quarter; Bri to contact Dean Stowe regarding blood drive dates; Bri to contact Dr. Cann regarding a mini anti-procrastination event for journal club assignment (dates 5/10/16 or 5/11/16); Everyone to gather interest for the Camp Quality volunteer opportunity; officers to submit draft of grant for anti-procrastination event to Dr. Elder by 5/16/16; Dr. Elder to order cords for class of 2016
StrategicPlanning:
Our central goals for the 2015-2016 year were to plan events relevant to our Society’s mission and create traditions within our chapter. We organized all events this year to express the Rho Chi mission statement in our school and community. We planned the Portland Promise School Supply Drive so that we could connect with underprivileged children in the Louisville community and help them realize the importance of education. In addition, we held a blood drive in conjunction with the Kentucky Blood Center and our school’s chapter of Kappa Psi, as a reminder that the focus of our academic endeavors in a medical field is ultimately to help other people. We planned to continue our two services we are most identified with at SUCOP: therapeutics exam reviews and individual and group tutoring. Both activities are beneficial for both tutor and tutee in regards to striving for excellence in the pharmaceutical sciences. We devoted much attention to analyzing the weaknesses of our chapter and creating strategies to improve the quality of service that we provide.
Activities:
Delta Kappa chapter’s presence within SUCOP is most strongly tied to our provision of individual tutoring services and exam reviews for Pharmacotherapeutics. Both are ongoing services that have been provided by Rho Chi for four years. Our chapter selects one of our current members in their third and final year to be the Individual Tutoring Coordinator, and we select another of our current members to be Chair of the Therapeutics Committee. This year, the Individual Tutoring coordinator was Marilin Castle, and the Therapeutics Committee Chair was Chelsea Maier. At the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year, the individual tutoring process started when a P2 in need of Therapeutics tutoring initiated a request with the Individual Tutoring Coordinator and listed three available time slots for the tutoring session. Marilin would then use a spreadsheet to find a P3 Rho Chi member with availability matching one of the tutee’s available time frames, and then Marilin would contact the P3 to confirm availability and set up the session. This task became cumbersome for Marilin because of the lack of overlapping availability between the P3s and the rest of the student body. The next quarters we tested various modifications to our tutoring service in hopes of increasing our accessibility. We opened up tutoring to other highly requested classes such as Medicinal Chemistry & Pharmacology, Calculations, Physiology, and Biochemistry. We utilized P2s (non-members), recommended by faculty, who were willing to volunteer their spare time to tutor P1s in calculations. We enlisted the help of SUCOP residents and APPE students on academic rotations to be present in the drug information center for “walk-in” tutoring during designated time frames on two days each week. Setting aside the same times each week for tutoring did not receive positive feedback from tutors and tutees both. Some students disliked the lack of personal attention since there could be many students asking for help at once, and many tutors complained that students did not utilize the resource on a regular basis so it was not time-efficient. Overall, 7 Rho Chi members provided tutoring services to approximately 15-20 students at SUCOP. Improving the quality of our tutoring remains one of our main priorities for the next year, and plans for improvement are underway. On the other hand, fortunately, 2015-2016 witnessed success for Delta Kappa’s Therapeutics Committee. A simple routine was established whereby members of the Therapeutics Committee were assigned two to three topics per quarter for which to generate practice exam-type questions. Committee Chair, Chelsea, emailed the members of the committee a list of topics, the topic’s assigned question writer, and a timeline of due-dates for the questions to be sent to the overseeing faculty and for the finalized questions to be sent to Chelsea. The committee member was asked to send approximately eight questions per topic to the faculty in charge of teaching the lecture, and the member had one week to receive feedback and adjust the questions, answers, and explanations accordingly. After Chelsea received the final questions for all the topics, she would compile them into a single test review, which we emailed to the current P2s in two different formats. One format was a PowerPoint presented as Question 1 followed by Answer/Explanation 1, then Question 2, Answer/Explanation 2, etc. The second format was a document presented in test format: questions 1-x followed by answer/explanation 1-x. We believe that providing both formats allows students to choose one based on their personal learning style. We also streamlined this process by creating a template for Therapeutics Committee members to use when drafting their questions, which drastically reduced the time it takes to compile the separate documents into one. All reviews are saved in our growing database of questions. We have received praise and positive feedback on the test reviews this year. As of June 2016, we will have provided 16 reviews to the class of 2017 during their four quarters of Pharmacotherapeutics. Both individual tutoring and Therapeutics reviews are chapter activities that align with The Society’s mission to “encourage and recognize excellence in intellectual achievement” as well as “foster fellowship among its members.” In the next academic year, we will continue to utilize the efficient process we have created for Therapeutics reviews, and we will continue to test different strategies for optimizing individual tutoring services.
Delta Kappa hosted a blood drive on campus at the College of Pharmacy for the second year in a row. This year’s blood drive differed from the previous because we planned the event in collaboration with SUCOP administration and SUCOP’s Kappa Psi chapter. Combining our efforts with other groups allowed us to spread the word to a greater number of people. Also, we coordinated the blood drive through the Kentucky Blood Center this year, as opposed to the American Red Cross in the past. We discovered that the Kentucky Blood Center is somewhat more flexible than Red Cross in terms of scheduling. We scheduled the blood drive for November 30, 2015, the Monday after Thanksgiving break and also the same day as a Therapeutics exam for P2s. The timing was not ideal for recruiting people to donate blood, and in coming years we have discussed scheduling the blood drive for October and incorporating Pharmacist Month. Despite this, we successfully had ~15 blood donors, and KY Blood Center has already reached out to Rho Chi to plan this event again. By providing the opportunity to directly help patients with something so essential to life as blood, we believe that we encourage high standards of conduct and character, reminding students and faculty that we have chosen a profession that directly impacts another person’s health.
Our chapter participated in two main patient outreach events for this academic year. The first event was the Rock-a-thon, hosted by SUCOP’s Student Society of Health-System Pharmacists (SSHP) chapter to promote mental health awareness. This was SSHP’s second year planning the event but Rho Chi’s first year getting involved. Along with many other student organizations at SUCOP, Rho Chi created a dance team of 4-6 people to raise money in the months leading up to the Rock-a-thon. The $90 that our team raised was donated to Seven Counties Services, a local nonprofit behavioral health center. There was a section of the event dedicated to educational posters for the general public on various mental disorders. Rho Chi provided a poster on anxiety disorders for this part of the Rock-a-thon. Approximately 20 Rho Chi members attended and/or were involved in the planning of this event. Throughout the day, the Rock-a-thon welcomed 60-80 people. The second patient outreach event that we planned was the Portland Promise Center School Supply Drive. Portland is a part of Louisville where many live below the poverty line. The Portland Promise Center is available for children in the neighborhood who need after-school care or daily supervision and programming during summer vacation; their vision is for Portland to thrive with the next generation by enriching the current youth’s spiritual, physical, and academic education. In May through July, Delta Kappa collected new school supplies donated by SUCOP students and faculty in boxes set outside the two main auditoriums. In August, two of our officers delivered the supplies to a group of 5-7 year olds at the Portland Promise Center, just in time for school to start. There were enough supplies for each of the ~15 children to have a full set of the “basic” supplies i.e. pencils, scissors, glue, crayons/markers, notebook, and folder. The Portland Promise Center School Supply Drive was relatively simply and easy to plan, and we were able to help many underprivileged children; hence we will likely continue events similar to this with The Portland Promise Center in the future. Ideas to improve the event in the future include asking the children and their parents/teachers to make a list of specific items the children need for school. Also, if scheduling allows, we would like to plan an event at the Portland Promise Center consisting of a few Rho Chi members educating a group of children with a brief and fun presentation on a medical topic, presented at an appropriate level for kids. Supporting the education of the current youth population makes it possible for these children to pursue intellectual excellence, and this was also an opportunity to introduce the profession of pharmacy to the younger generation.
Financial/ Budgeting:
Our chapter sponsored three fundraising events this year. Our goals for fundraising annually are to cover the cost of our initiation ceremony and the cost of purchasing honors cords for our graduating members. The first of our three fundraisers involved selling SUCOP branded insulated tumblers that remained from last year’s fundraiser. By promoting these tumblers to students, we were able to raise $58.47. Our second fundraiser involved selling boxed lunches from Chick-fil-a, along with deserts that were made by our members. This fundraiser was very successful and brought in a total of $133.35 after all expenses were paid. For our final fundraiser, members worked together to provide a pasta lunch for students. Several pasta and sauce options were prepared by members and offered for sale to students. This was our most successful event, which raised $250.48. In addition to these activities, our remaining funding was provided by member dues, which were $125.00 each. Together, this support was enough to cover the cost of the initiation banquet, $1,359, and the estimated cost of cords for graduating members.