[MUSIC PLAYING] AMY JONES-TIMONEY: Hi, I'm Amy Jones-Timoney
from the University of Kentucky.
And today, I am here in the College of Pharmacy with Dean Dr. Kip Guy.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
KIP GUY: Glad to join you.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: I guess as we start our walk outside the College of Pharmacy, tell
me a little bit about what attracted you to the University of Kentucky.
KIP GUY: Sure.
So I was previously at a large charity hospital focused on pediatric patients.
I ran a large research group there developing drugs for children, mostly with cancer.
So I'd been out of the university for almost 15 years and started to think about what the
next phase of my career would be.
I knew I wanted to give back to the university.
I wanted to keep working in health disparities, which is a major driver for what I do.
And I looked around for jobs I thought would be good to do those two things and Kentucky
is an amazing place for doing that kind of work.
We have one of the top 10 pharmacy schools in the country, indeed in the world, that's
been there ever since we started ranking schools.
And we have a lot of very motivated, capable faculty who work on the kinds of problems
that interested me.
So for me, it was a perfect storm, an ability to teach again, an ability to work with that
group of faculty.
And they do it in an area that had the problems that motivate me to work.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: What about the students?
Why are they attracted to the UK College of Pharmacy?
KIP GUY: Sure, so we have a nice broad range of students who come here, both from Kentucky
and from out of state.
A good number of them are legacy pharmacists.
We have been one of the strongest clinical pharmacy programs for 50 years.
So we have many graduates whose kids choose to come back here.
Because their parents came here.
And they're often Kentucky natives.
We get people that come from all over the world.
Because they know the quality of the college.
They want to learn how to do pharmacy the way we do it, which is fully integrated really
intentional, and aimed at making sure the patients get the best medical care they can.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: Well, now that we know a little bit more about the students and what
attracted you to come here to UK, let's head inside the college and talk a little bit more
about the curriculum.
KIP GUY: Sure.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: So we've made our way upstairs to the patient care lab correct, correct?
KIP GUY: Correct.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: Tell me a little bit about what goes on in these spaces and why it's
so important.
KIP GUY: Sure.
So we've just finished a major revision of the pharmacy curriculum which is the primary
degree for our pharmacists.
And there are a couple underpinning philosophies for that.
One of them is that we teach from the perspective of a holistic patient care.
So when people arrive here nowadays, they meet a patient in their first week.
They learn about diagnosis and diagnostic reasoning and clinical reasoning.
And then the entire curriculum is taught from that perspective.
Another underpinning of it is what's called interprofessional activities, so the idea
we work in a team that has medical professionals of all different types.
And the third underpinning is that we believe you learn by using your hands.
You learn the theory.
And then you do the theory.
And those come together in this space, which is really aimed at teaching the practical
aspects of patient care.
KIP GUY: So a major part of their training is actual externships outside the college
in a variety of settings.
And those range from private independent pharmacies out in rural areas in Kentucky to large clinics
like that across the street.
So they can see very high acuity patients, people that are very ill and very complex
diseases.
They can meet people who need aspirin and everything in between.
That gives the student an opportunity to see how pharmacy is practiced in all those different
settings, understand what they want to do, and then re-emphasize that training as they
go through the years of the program.
And indeed, many of them in post graduate training to be best prepared for the career
they want.
So that starts as a summer activity in the middle of school.
And by the last year of school, it's essentially all experiential.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: Well, what kind of impact does your college have out in the community?
KIP GUY: We have impacts at a number of different levels.
So I think probably the most fundamental is our graduates practice.
And they practice all over the world.
But many of them stick in the Commonwealth.
We're actually this evening having our formal welcome to the college for our new class which
we call white coating.
And we will have an alumni, Bill Shely, who built a pharmacy in an elevator shaft inside
a clinic.
Because that was the only space available for him to practice in the setting where he
wanted to practice.
So that kind of story is not at all uncommon among our graduates.
You'll meet them at Rite Aid or Kroger or CVS.
You'll meet them in the Community Bluegrass Clinic just a mile away from here that has
a number lower income patients.
And you will meet many of them across the street or in every other hospital you can
imagine.
I met another pair of alumna, husband and wife, who moved to Jacksonville, Florida about
two decades ago.
When they got there, the pharmacy was in the basement of the hospital.
And they exported the Kentucky model.
So now, their pharmacists practice on the wards.
They practice collaboratively with the physicians.
So you can see we have impacts everywhere we go.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: That's important to you, isn't it?
To have that impact on the community?
KIP GUY: It is.
I think it's the fundamental reason we all do our jobs, right?
We want to make sure our patients are well taken care of.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: Well, thank you so much for showing us around the patient care lab
space.
I know research is another important aspect of the curriculum and what you do here.
So let's head upstairs and take a look at those labs.
KIP GUY: Great.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: So we've made our way to your research lab, correct?
KIP GUY: Yes.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: Here in the College of Pharmacy.
Tell me a little bit about some of the work that goes on specifically in this lab.
KIP GUY: In my lab?
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: Yes.
KIP GUY: So our major focus is on catastrophic diseases, where there are not drugs available.
And what we try to do is find new starting points to enable putting a drug in the clinic
that doesn't exist right now.
So one of our major focuses is malaria, half a million deaths a year, several hundred million
cases a year, but the typical amount of money available to treat a case is a few dollars.
There's not a strong commercial driver to get a drug forward in the clinic.
I come from a rural agrarian part of the US.
And I spent a good bit of my life living in places where there wasn't a lot of money,
there wasn't a lot of privilege, and saw the impact of poor access to care.
So that became a motivator for me pretty early.
So I think one of the things I learned in my life was we don't do anything alone.
And when we run into an unusual problem, the bigger the circle of people we have to draw
on to think about how to do that problem, the better.
So I built a habit of surrounding myself by smart people that came from very different
places.
And I've continued to try that as a way of working everywhere that I've been, including
here at the college.
So we look to not only have diversity of color and diversity of gender, but also diversity
of background, age, status, veteran, non-veteran, just about any way you can think about broadening
the pool of people who can come to the table to fix something.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: As far as your overall research outlook at the college, just generally
speaking, what are the types of issues that faculty members here are trying to tackle?
KIP GUY: Sure.
So the thing that pulls us all together is medications.
So in that umbrella, I have everybody from people who focus on very fundamental chemistry,
solubility of materials, for example, which affects how they dissolve out of a tablet,
or how you make an IV solution to administer the drug, all the way over to people who focus
on the outcomes, how a drug's used in a population of patients and what happens both positively
and negatively in that population.
For example, we work in opioid use disorders in the Commonwealth.
And we have just brought in an enormous grant as part of a consortium to try to reduce opioid
use by 40% in a number of counties in Kentucky.
So that's a very different end of the spectrum from what I do.
But it all relates back to how medications are used for patients' benefit.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: Well, thank you so much for showing us around the College of Pharmacy
today.
Before we go, is there anything else that you want people to know about your college?
KIP GUY: We're the best that there is at what we do.
We love to have people in our community as students, as faculty and staff who are as
dedicated as we are at helping patients.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: Well, thank you so much for showing us around today.
KIP GUY: Sure.
AMY JONES-TIMONEY: If you would like more information on the College of Pharmacy, just
visit the link on your screen.