Report of the 2019-2020 strategic engagement standing committee

For the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) strategic engagement is critical to the success of colleges and schools of pharmacy in expanding pharmacy and public health practice, meeting programmatic needs, and fulfilling institutional missions. The 2019-2020 Strategic Engagement Committee was charged with exploring the collaborative relationships colleges and schools have within their state to advance pharmacy practice. More specifically, this committee was tasked to examine those relationships with current state pharmacy and medical associations. This report seeks to provide insights from this work and share recommendations to assist AACP in facilitating practice transformation. To uncover current schools’ relationships with state and medical associations, the committee utilized AACP’s ability in convening members to conduct focus groups at INsight 2020 and one-on-one interviews with key faculty members. Overall, partnerships with state pharmacy associations are successful or growing, whereas there is still work to be done in developing relationships and collaborating with medical and health care societies. We found that there are several schools with “best practices” related to state association collaborations and look to highlight exemplar practices in this report as they are critical towards practice transformations.