Local pharmacist Shawn Taylor wins statewide award

Pharmacist Shawn Taylor’s healthcare philosophy sounds simple: provide the best care to every patient regardless of their ability to pay. But putting that principle into practice is anything but easy, which is why Dr. Taylor’s efforts, in the mountains of North Carolina and in Honduras, helped earn her the Ambulatory Care Pharmacist of the Year Award.

Reserved for “a pharmacist with immense moral character, good citizenship, and high professional ideals who has made significant contributions to their area of practice,” the award is given by the North Carolina Association of Pharmacists.

Michelle Chaplin, associate dean of pharmacy on Wingate’s Hendersonville campus, says NCAP made the right choice.

“Shawn has worked to build a practice serving majority low-income patients in Western North Carolina. She has worked to expand her skill set to meet the needs of this community and has paved the way for additional pharmacy positions to be created and filled,” Chaplin said. “She’s obtained grants to further the reach of her care. Shawn inspires student pharmacists by involving them significantly in her practice.”

Taylor helps students understand that no matter how much they know about medications, they won’t be successful unless they can communicate well and help patients overcome hurdles.

“I tell my students that 50 percent of the job is figuring out the best medication and the other 50 percent is figuring out how the patient is going to get the medication into their body,” Taylor said.

Alongside her at the Dale Fell location of the Appalachian Mountain Community Health Centers, they see what she means. For example, she describes one of several patients she sees in a typical day: a man experiencing homelessness who needs insulin therapy for diabetes.

“For someone in his scenario, there are a lot of barriers: no access to a refrigerator, the need for a clean injection site even though he doesn’t get to bathe frequently, the need to dispose of supplies in a safe way,” she said.

She has enrolled him in a patient-assistance program to get insulin even though he’s uninsured, and she’s prescribed the type of insulin that can last the longest without refrigeration. A grant has provided testing supplies so he can track his blood sugar.

“He has a lot of edema in his legs, because he sleeps in his car and can’t keep his feet elevated, so we found him some compression stockings, and that swelling is improving,” Taylor said. “A social-work team is working on finding housing.”

It’s been a three-year process to get him this far. But Taylor won’t give up. Persistence is part of what she wants to pass on to students. Taylor acts as a “preceptor,” or onsite instructor, for third- and fourth-year pharmacy students. Onsite with her, they work as autonomously as the law allows, running appointments while Taylor observes.

“It’s especially good when they get to follow up with the same patients, seeing how their intervention worked or didn’t,” Taylor said, adding that students are often shocked by the barriers patients face. “Students get to hear firsthand that a patient is struggling to either pay for their medicine or buy groceries or gas…. It’s a lot easier to understand their decisions when you are talking with them.”

As a clinical pharmacist practitioner, an additional license that allows her to provide treatment unsupervised for certain conditions, Taylor sees patients one-on-one. She became the first CPP at AMCHC in 2017 and quickly proved the value of her services, expanding the program and hiring a second full-time CPP last year.

The addition of Kailey Hoots (valedictorian of Wingate’s pharmacy class of 2020) at AMCHC’s location in Murphy, North Carolina, means patients there no longer have to use telehealth or wait for Taylor’s next trek from Asheville to the state’s westernmost corner. But when it comes to ensuring that people get the help they need, Taylor isn’t opposed to travel. For the past decade, she has taken off multiple times a year to Guachipilincito, a remote Honduran village of about 500, as part of a Shoulder to Shoulder medical brigade.

After her first mission, she knew she wanted to include Wingate students. Two years later, Taylor had developed a for-credit course associated with the brigade, and since 2015 she’s personally taken more than a dozen students and recruited other faculty members to follow suit.

This summer, Taylor took Haley Clark and Kendall Wick on the University’s first international trip since the beginning of the pandemic. During four clinic days, their Shoulder to Shoulder team, which also included a physician, a medical student, a community health liaison and interpreters, saw 88 patients, dispensed 224 prescriptions and educated 61 children on nutrition and dental hygiene.

“Dr. Taylor let Kendall and I run the pharmacy, which definitely boosted my confidence in being able to be a pharmacist,” Clark said.

Although the physician sometimes prescribed specific medications, at other times he simply offered a diagnosis, leaving it up to the students to determine which medications were appropriate. Taylor says the work in Guachipilincito is one of the first times that many pharmacy students truly feel a part of an interdisciplinary team.

“While we’re there, the patients see the doctor and the pharmacist in the same space,” she says. “It’s my chance to take a back seat, letting the students collaborate with the physician.”

Taylor says the most rewarding part of her role as professor is the relationships she builds, connecting with students early and helping equip them with not only clinical education but important soft skills.

Above the awards, that’s what makes her job so satisfying.

This article originally appeared on Hendersonville Times-News: Local pharmacist Shawn Taylor wins statewide award