Registrar's Message: Nice to hear from you! May. 4, 2016 Registrar, Social Media

Registrar's Message: Nice to hear from you!

I attended a meeting of the Pharmacy Leaders of Tomorrow (also known as PLoT) last week. This is a grassroots group of young pharmacists in the community who get together to talk about the profession and stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship. The group, co-founded by Aaron Sihota and Gerry Spitzner, is run by a Steering Committee of 11 pharmacists and has been extremely well received. I believe it’s meeting a need for younger pharmacists to get together, talk about their experience working in pharmacy, the issues they face and explore topics that interest them.  I’ve attended in the past, to present on College topics, and to engage in discussions. It’s a great group - I’d encourage you to check them out at leadersofpharmacy.com or find them on Twitter with @RXLeaders if you have an interest.

Last week’s meeting was held at Shebeen, an intimate venue in Gastown. We, together with PLoT, put this event on so we could share what is happening with pharmacist prescribing and seek feedback on what people think about it. We were pleasantly surprised when the event was sold out in only a few hours!  Granted, the capacity of the venue was only 60, but we were still overwhelmed by the response. We had a waiting list! Who’d a thunk that there would ever be a waiting list for a College event?  

Mind you, we did have a waiting list for some of our naloxone education sessions. Nice problem to have, eh?  Thankfully, we were able to adjust the size of some of our venues to help accommodate more people and also provided a webcast for one of the five sessions. Over 1000 of you participated either through the in-person or webcast sessions and all of the resources, including the webcast are available on our website at bccollege.pharmacy/naloxone. That’s kind of awesome!

Have you noticed that we’ve been broadcasting many of our events via Periscope or webcast?   

We broadcast our April Board meeting on Periscope, and had over 100 people watching on each day. We also captured key info from the meeting through tweets and Instagram photos, all of which was amalgamated via Storify and included in the Board highlights which were published immediately following the meeting. I think it’s pretty cool and you can check it out on the April Board Meeting highlights page. It’s through these social tools that we were able to reach far more people that we have been able to before.

Over the last year, we have engaged significantly through these new tools. Our reach is substantially greater than it ever has been. We recently passed our 1000 follower milestone on Twitter, we’ve started using Instagram and Storify to make our content more engaging, and we continue to grow our reach on Facebook, and are especially turning to it for important campaigns like DrugSafeBC and non-prescription naloxone. And we’ve been collaborating more with stakeholders, registrants and patients online.  In addition to engaging with pharmacy professionals and others, this provides a deeper layer of public transparency, which I think is important and valuable.

We are on a new and exciting path for increased engagement to better inform and guide the decisions of the Board. Follow us on social media and spread the word!