NCPA Compounding Competition

On Saturday April 16^th, this year’s Compounding Competition will take place at the Pharmacy School. The event will be from 9am-3:30pm and take place upstairs in Room 271. Lunch will be provided for all those who attend the event and will consist of a baked potato bar provided by the Schools NCPA Chapter. The competition itself will consist of Three Parts which the participant will be Judged on and a tentative competitions schedule is provided below:

Tentative Timeline	Competition Schedule
9AM-10AM	Test
10AM-12PM	Compounding Lab
12PM-1PM	Lunch/Poster Walk-through
1PM-3PM	Poster Presentation
3PM-3:30PM	Breakdown and Clean Up

The test portion of the compounding competition will be taken on an individual basis without the use of any notes or resources. Further information about the test will be forthcoming and discussed at the competition meeting on Monday April 4^th at 5:30pm. The Second part of the competition will be in the compounding lab and each team will have 1 hour an 40 minutes to compound 2 preparations (breaks down to 50 minutes each) and fill out the packet of material for the two preparations. After the lab, we will have lunch and the posters which each team will have made prior to the event will be displayed for participants, spectators, and judges to see. The poster portion of the competition is new this year to the local competition, but it is a big point of focus at the national competition. Each team will be responsible for making a poster prior to the competition and the topic of the poster will be made known to each team well before the competitions date (Hint-The topic will be about a major topic in the realm of compounding). Finally after lunch, each team will have 15 minutes to present their team’s poster to  and answer questions from a panel of judges. This will be done in private and the Judges will be announced at a later date.

Further information about the competition will be discussed at the final supplemental meeting in April before the actual competition on April 16^th. This final meeting will be on April 4^th at 5:30pm in Room 104 and the speaker at the event will be Dr. Addison Livingston. He is a South Carolina Board of Pharmacy Member, owner of Hawthorne’s pharmacy in Columbia, and will be discussing "Major Topic’s" affecting the future of compounding. Participants in the competition are strongly advised to try and attend this meeting as it will be recorded like other previous meeting, but you will not be able to ask questions to a recording.

So far, there are 9 teams planning to participate in the competition, but there is still plenty of room for more people to participate. The competition will be challenging, but I can honestly say from past experience, it’s is a lot of fun and you will be proud to say that you competed. It is a great way to network with practicing pharmacists who come to speak at the school and judge at the competition. Our professors are always saying that pharmacy is a small and everyone knows everyone. While this is very true, compounding pharmacy is a much smaller and a lot more interconnected group within our profession. If you feel that compounding is something which you want to do or you think you would like to do in the future, then participating in this competition is a great way of strengthening your CV and making connections in the compounding community. You will not know how to do everything during the competition and honestly, you are not expected too. It is truly something which is meant to be fun to do and while it is a competition, you are competing among and with friends. So...

Finally, if you wish to participate in the competition, please contact Zack Simpson (ztsimpson@presby.edu) BY March 31^st, 2016 at 5pm. If you are a member among one of the nine teams already planning to participate in the competition, please check the team roster tab under in the compounding competition’s moodle page and let me know if there are any corrections which need to be made to the page.