The goal of the APhA-ASP National Patient Counseling Competition (NPCC) 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.
Save The Date: This year's NPCC local UGA competition will begin in November and run through December or January. Members will be notified of more details later in the semester.
The competition begins on the local level as students compete to be the national representative from their college of pharmacy. At UGA, we host our local competition in a similar format to the national competition, with one preliminary round and one final round. During the preliminary round, students are presented with a new prescription and are challenged to counsel a patient on the new prescription and appropriate use of the drug involved. Students are given time to refer to reference materials for five minutes before beginning their counseling session. 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 sessions. The ten highest scoring participants are then invited to the final round.
The final round involves a more complex counseling situation, where the participants again are presented with a prescription at random and are asked to counsel the patient on safe and effective drug use. In addition, the patient in the final round will display personality characteristics such as anxiousness, belligerence, or apathy to challenge the participants' ability to convey pertinent information in a realistic situation. The top participant advances to represent UGA at the national level. The national competition, which takes place during APhA's Annual Meeting & Exposition, follows a similar format.
At UGA, all participants in the local competition receive a certificate of participation. The winner of the local competition receives a travel stipend of $750 to attend the APhA Annual Meeting & Exposition. The winner of the National Competition will receive $1,000 and a National Patient Counseling Competition plaque with the winner’s name engraved on the front. It is a tradition that the winner of the National Patient Counseling Competition be invited back the following year to serve as a judge for the next National Competition. The winner’s school will receive a crystal award. All finalists will receive a monetary prize. The First Runner-up will receive a $750 prize. The second runner-up will receive a $500 prize. The remaining seven finalists will each receive a $250 prize.