Medication adherence challenge live today – National Consumers League

By Rebecca Burkholder, NCL Vice President for Health Policy

Today marks the launch of the 2013 Medication Adherence Team Challenge, a month-long competitive outreach project to engage student pharmacists and other health care professional students and faculty in coming up with creative solutions to raise awareness about medication adherence as a critical public health issue. With nearly three out of four Americans not taking their medications as directed—which results in serious health consequences, especially for people with chronic diseases—it will take a team of health care professionals to moved the needle on adherence.

The Challenge is just one part of the National Consumers League’s Script Your Future campaign, a 3-year program to raise awareness of the importance of medication adherence. Launched in 2011, the campaign has more than 130 public and private stakeholder organizations, and provides tools to help patients and health care professionals better communicate about ways to improve medication adherence.

During the month of February the Challenge will engage interdisciplinary student teams from pharmacy, medicine, nursing, and other health professions to tackle the problem of poor adherence.  The teams will be implementing creative solutions and outreach in their communities to raise awareness and improve understanding about medication adherence, using Script Your Future materials.  At the end of the Challenge, select schools or colleges will be recognized nationally for their efforts to improve medication adherence.

“One of the best hopes we have for changing our culture of nonadherence is to train the next generation of health care professionals to be proactive about engaging their patients, and that starts in the classroom through the innovation brought forward by health professions faculty,” said Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director.

The Challenge is returning to university campuses across the country after a successful first year of student innovation. To learn more about last year’s winners visit the Script Your Future Web site. The winners of Challenge 2013 will be announced later this spring.

This year’s Challenge is sponsored by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP), the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (NACDS) Foundation, the American Medical Association (AMA), and the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA).

For more information on the Challenge visit the Challenge Community at https://syfadherencechallenge.ning.com/. Follow the challenge on Twitter at #SYFchallenge.  To learn more about the campaign, go to www.ScriptYourFuture.org.