Academy of Employee Pharmacists

Welcome to the home of the Academy of Employee Pharmacists. AEP is one of GPhA’s oldest academies and represents pharmacists employed in various practice settings. Employee pharmacists have unique issues and needs and AEP serves to articulate those needs to the GPhA board and staff.

From Georgia Pharmacy magazine:

The single most fascinating quality about the Academy of Employee Pharmacists is that there’s not a whole lot of “single most” about it.

The category of employee pharmacist, is an incredibly broad one, encompassing line pharmacists and pharmacist managers, pharmacists who work in large corporate structures, and pharmacists dispensing on two- or three-person crews in small independent operations. The most obvious something that unites pharmacists under this category is actually quite banal: Employee pharmacists collect a paycheck from somebody else.

But there’s a subtler element uniting employee pharmacists, one that belies their category. All employee pharmacists — floaters, district supervisors, and every shade in between — are thrust in managerial roles whether they’re ready for such roles or not.

Consider the sorts of management concerns a pharmacist manager will typically face: an underperforming technician, an over-prescribing doctor, a non-adherent patient, a non-pharmacist boss. Employed pharmacists frequently find themselves in a web of interpersonal relations, managing in every direction — down, across, and, often painfully, up. And employed pharmacists would be the first to admit they respond to these daily onslaughts of interpersonal bugaboos armed with little formal management training.

How urgent are their concerns about their managerial roles? In fall 2015, GPhA surveyed our pharmacist members to find out. The results were, to say the least, eye-opening:

Perhaps all this can be summed up with this statistic: 90% of employed pharmacists surveyed want to work within a collaborative healthcare system, characterized by positive channels of communication: pharmacist-to-pharmacist, pharmacist-to-technician, pharmacist-to-physician, pharmacist-to-patient. In short, pharmacists want to work on a healthcare team. And overwhelmingly, they feel that they work on anything but that.

Board of Directors

Shobhna Butler, Chair
Brent Lake, Vice Chair

Michelle Blalock, Recording Secretary
Melanie DeFusco, AEP Board Rep

Stuart Bradley
Michelle Cruson
Mollie Durham
Ashley Hannings
Susan Kane
Roger Lanier
Bill McLeer

Mary Ritchie, GPhA Staff Liaison (mritchie@gpha.org; 404-419-8115)

Bylaws

Click here to view or download the AEP bylaws.