Nataley Davis | staff writer

Over 40 million Americans live with diabetes.

On Tuesday, Duquesne’s student chapter of the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) hosted an outreach event in the Student Union for Diabetes Alert Day, a nationally observed day of awareness created by the American Diabetes Association.

Two students in the pharmacy program, Anna Sholties and Ericka Richards, are on the Operation Diabetes Committee and are focused on advocacy and education.

Richards, who is also the vice president of patient care for APhA, said that their committee is important to the organization because of the role pharmacists play in diabetes prevention and management.

“I feel like people don’t really realize how vital pharmacists are because we know a lot about the medications that go into it and adjusting them and helping patients with lifestyle modifications,” Richards said.

She added that for Type 1 diabetes management of the disease is the goal since its cause is unknown. But for Type 2, it is important to educate students on prevention.

“A lot of people now are predisposed to diabetes based off of genetics or environmental factors, 
so we’re educating on the risk of getting diabetes too since we have younger people here in the campus community,” Richards said.

Tuesday’s tabling event worked to achieve those initiatives by presenting students with an educational tri-fold board outlining the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, other health complications that diabetes can lead to, ways to manage the disease and resources to find proper nutrition on a limited budget.

It also featured interactive education like a prediabetes risk assessment, a visual representation of the amount of sugar in common snacks and a model of what organs are affected by diabetes.

APhA also partnered with Duquesne’s chapter of the Pennsylvania Pharmacists Association and the Pennsylvania Society of Health-System Pharmacists to run the table.

Anna Comis, vice president of the Pennsylvania Pharmacists Association at Duquesne, said that she was excited to collaborate with APhA on the initiative because her group mainly focuses on policy rather than patient care.

“It’s mostly advocacy for community pharmacies and stuff like that because of the lack of awareness when it comes to reimbursement for those pharmacies,” Comis said. “In other states, there’s different pharmacy laws for what pharmacists can do. Pennsylvania is one of the most strict, so we advocate for ourselves as a profession mostly.”

Last year, the group visited the capitol building in Harrisburg to advocate for community pharmacies staying open.

Sholties, who is also the president of APhA, said that along with Diabetes Alert Day, the Operation Diabetes committee works to educate the community and student pharmacists throughout the year with guest speakers and other outreach events.

She added that APhA as a whole is committed to advocacy and making positive change for the many health issues that pharmacists have an impact on.

“We’re focused on a wide variety of pharmacy, and we try to do patient care activities and community outreach events,” Sholties said. 
”We do vaccinations and diabetes education … education with substance use disorder and over the counter medication education.”

Sholties said that the main outreach event for pharmacy students is the Duquesne School of Pharmacy’s annual health fair in Mellon Square. Students from all of the School of Pharmacy organizations get together and set up booths to raise awareness about different topics.

Sholties and Richards gave a similar presentation to Tuesday’s tabling event at the fair in September.

Richards said that she wants people to walk away from APhA’s diabetes awareness efforts with more recognition of the condition’s gravity and prevalence in the United States.

“I think a lot of people don’t know how serious of a disease it is,” she said. “A lot of complications can happen from not managing diabetes … understanding the whole disease and what it can do [is important].”

Nataley Davis can be reached at davisn5@duq.edu