Hung Tran, a first-year student pharmacist at the UC Irvine School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, advanced to the final round of the 2022 American Pharmacists Association – Academy of Student Pharmacists (APhA-ASP) National Patient Counseling Competition. Tran prevailed as one of the top 10 finalists among 122 other student competitors.
“There are usually well over 100 participants consisting mostly of students in the final year of their PharmD program,” said Christine Cadiz, health sciences clinical associate professor. “This feat is incredible, and we are so proud of Hung for his hard work to advance this far.”
The goal of the APhA-ASP National Patient Counseling Competition is to encourage student pharmacists in their efforts toward becoming better patient educators. The competition is designed to reflect changes that are occurring in practice, to promote and encourage further professional development of the student pharmacist and to reinforce the role of the pharmacist as a health care provider and educator.
The competition begins on the local level as students compete to be the national representative from their school or college of pharmacy. Once the local winner from each school or college of pharmacy is selected, they advance to compete on the national level in two rounds: preliminary and final.
In the preliminary round, students select a simple practice scenario at random and are required to counsel a patient on the appropriate use of the drug involved. Students are then given time to refer to the reference sources available in the model pharmacy. After consulting the references and determining the appropriate information for the patient, the participants counsel the patient. Evaluations are based on the content and style of the counseling presentations. The ten highest-scoring participants are then invited to the final round, which involves a more complex counseling situation where the patient will display personality characteristics such as anxiousness, belligerence, or apathy to challenge the participants’ ability to convey pertinent information in a realistic situation.
Hung Tran was one of ten finalists to advance to the National Patient Counseling Competition at the APhA Annual Meeting held on March 17-19.
“I am honored to represent UCI at the 2022 APhA-ASP National Patient Counseling Competition,” said Tran. “I want to thank my family, friends, professors, and cohort, who were always there to support me. This competition will definitely be one of my best memories in pharmacy school.”
