Meet the 2021 Wellspring Award Winners

JULY 2021 – The Canadian Foundation for Pharmacy is excited to announce the 2021 recipients of the Wellspring Pharmacy Leadership Awards: Alyssa Aco, Feng Chang, Jane Ling and James Morrison. With support from CFP, this year’s winners tackle gaps in hypo/hyperglycemic management in home care, how to tell impactful stories to propel the professsion, new strategies to deal with tobacco addiction, and ways to improve pharmacy education around 2SLGBTQ+ patient care.

Alyssa Aco: Alyssa is a community pharmacist at Costco in Edmonton, AB, as well as a lab facilitator at the University of Alberta Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

She will use funds from the Wellspring Award in the Quality Improvement Project, identifying gaps in communication and practice inconsistencies related to hypo/hyperglycemic management in home care. The goal is to design a standard practice protocol to streamline glycemic management, and assess whether this improves the communication and quality of care.

Feng Chang: Feng is an Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy.

The Wellspring award funding will enable her to attend the “Media and Medicine Program: How to tell stories that make a difference” offered by Harvard Medical School. Her goal is to use knowledge gleaned through the program to effectively reach different audiences to impact change in the profession.

Jane Ling: Jane is President of Pharmacists for a Smoke Free Canada (PSFC) and the North Durham Family Health team Pharmacist.

Funding from the Wellspring Award will be used to develop a no-cost virtual Lower Risk Nicotine Use (LRNU) Education Symposium for pharmacists. This will include providing algorithms for harm reduction and vaping cessation algorithm to be hosted on the PSFC website. The goal is to give pharmacists more knowledge to assist patients with harm reduction strategies and the potential to become experts in LRNU.

James Morrison: James is an Ontario pharmacist and Director of Pharmacy Excellence at Whole Health Pharmacy Partners.

The Wellspring Award will support him in completing his Master of Science in Pharmacy program from the University of Saskatchewan, where his thesis will focus on evaluating whether educational institutions are evolving their curricula adequately to train students to provide care for gender and sexual minority patients (2SLGBTQ+ population).

“I anticipate that through my learning, research, and publication of findings that I will be able to influence the education of pharmacy students, and thereby improve access to competent pharmacy care for gender and sexual minority patients across Canada,” says James.