The document discusses the important role that pharmacy students will play in the complex system of healthcare delivery and communication. It notes that pharmacy students will see firsthand how poor communication and other issues can negatively impact patient care and outcomes. The document also highlights some of the challenges patients may face in accessing and affording necessary medications due to a variety of social and economic factors. Pharmacy students are encouraged to use their position and knowledge to help advocate for patients and work towards improving the system.

1. The Last Supper:
of Pills and Paper
Regina talks to pharmacy students in a storybook format fully illustrated with
large print.

2. Welcome Pharmacy Students!
You are an incredibly
important link in the chain
of communication

3. What work will effect you?
The doctors orders
The medical transcription
The coordination of care
The patient’s verbal history
You may not conduct the score,
but you better be willing to keep it.
You will see and hear the entire
orchestra of care.

4. Sometimes,
care will be a travesty
of poor communication.

5. This is Sutent in a Shadow box.
It is a mixed media piece of pills & paper.
It is priced at cost in homage of the
retail price of the pills alone.
17 pills $24,285.71

6. Sometimes you will attend medical conferences
and you will hear that patients are not compliant.
Frederick A Holliday II, loving husband and father
on June 17th 2009,
could not open his eyes, he could not speak, he could barely breath,
but he took his damn pills before he died.
And they dare to say we are not medically compliant.

7. You will see a young mother
grow old and tired and never
stop caring for her son.

8. You will watch children
with inhalers,
grow into young adults without
means to pay for this
life-saving device.
You will watch the dominoes fall…

9. You will try to answer questions privately, while a line of impatient onlookers wait for
their prescriptions.

10. You will see patients try to advocate
for themselves,
Without the safe checks of
CPOE, CDS and e-prescribing.

11. You will help some people to have full
and active lives.
They will get medicine that will allow them
to walk and open jar lids.
Such people will have insurance.
The other people will get
Wheelchairs.

12. Sometimes
There will be errors.
Sometimes people
Will die.

13. Sometimes a pill becomes a
prison silo, rather than
a release of pain.

14. Sometimes when a patient needs
it the most,
Medication will not be available.
A gray market darkness
will surround you,
Or an institution
will not be able to pay the bills,
Or a government that once helped
its citizens finds its coffer bare.

15. You will see patients try to dance that delicate dance of
east meets west.

16. And you will try teach
patients proper care
When they already
“self-medicating.”

17. You will see that return on investment is measured in many ways.

18. When you have seen all of this, then you will choose:
Do you take the red pill
or the blue?
Do you go on and say
that is just the way it is?
Or
do you jump into the rabbit hole?

19. And when jump into that hole,
There will be a door.
You can have a voice.
You can change things.
We look forward to seeing you
in the wonderland
of health policy.