A Creative Picture of Mental Health and More with Dr. Elizabeth Skoy!

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Dr. Elizabeth Skoy is an Associate Professor of Pharmacy Practice at the North Dakota State University School of Pharmacy. She has a strong passion for innovation in education and within community pharmacy and uses this passion to drive her service, teaching and research.

Book Recommendations:
-- Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers - Thomas A. Angelo, K. Patricia Cross

-- What the Best College Teachers Do - Ken Bain
Questions? Comments? Recommend someone for an interview? Contact us [e-mail] or find us on twitter @twopillspodcast!

Highlights (full transcript at www.twopillspodcast.com):

My practice background is Community Pharmacy. I touch on the expansion of Community Pharmacy rather than the traditional roles. I teach non-sterile compounding, point-of-care testing like hypercholesterolemia and glucose, and some of the newer point-of-care test such as strep or influenza. I also teach in the immunizations course.
Don't let the students or interns get lost in the regular workflow. Community pharmacies get busy, but don't forget about those teaching moments. Pull your learners into moments when you are calling providers are reviewing profiles. That way, they are exposed to more of the pharmacist role than the technician role. Bring them into those behind the scenes of behind the counter moments that we use our knowledge in our license for.
I have always been passionate about service. A colleague and I decided to start up a medical mission rotation to Guatemala. We started it eight or nine years ago. As we were setting up this rotation, we were brainstorming how we could capture learning. It felt like surveys, preceptor evaluations, or even reflections would not capture the in-depth learning that is happening. So, we discovered the methodology of Photovoice. It uses a camera to capture a time, moment, or experience. We wanted to use photography to capture their learning. We found their reflections to be so much deeper doing that.
From there, my colleague and I thought about how we could capture a medication experience. My colleague has a practice site in a psychiatric clinic. We decided to focus on patients who were taking medications for mental health. Our findings were fascinating and we learn so much from our participants. We noticed that the college students in our cohort had a slightly different experience than the other participants. We received a seed Grant from our School of Pharmacy to study our North Dakota State University college students. We then recruited college students to participate in Photovoice. It has drastically expanded in such a positive way.

Our Counseling Center sat in on the interviews and thought that this could be a new way to approach group therapy. They have done some Photovoice sessions within the Counseling Center. Participants have often been resistant to group therapy due to stigma, anxiety, etc. When they were talking about a photograph, the focus was on the photo and not on them and their illness. We collected those photographs and reflections. It has become a campus-wide movement to start to talk about mental health from the viewpoint of our college students in a different way. A professor of photography on campus is working with us. She puts it really well by saying that “everyone can relate to a photograph”. Once we can agree that we can relate to a photograph, we come a step closer to being able to relate to someone with mental illness.
So much of what I do is focus on collaboration. Everything is better in a team. I do not have all the answers or the strengths. Other people bring skills and information to the table. I try to take advantage of an