(40) Assessing the Impact of a Real-World Legislative Visit on Student Pharmacists’ Perceptions on Legislative Advocacy

Objective : To assess the impact of legislative visits on student pharmacists’ perceptions of advocacy by comparing changes in Political Skill Inventory (PSI), and perceptions of advocacy skills, and responsibility scores before and after a legislative visit.

Methods: This was a multicenter study comparing prior participation and attitude towards engagement in legislative advocacy, knowledge of state and federal legislators, and their perceived political advocacy skills utilizing the PSI scale. Anonymous surveys utilizing Qualtrics XM (Qualtrics, LLC) were sent out. Student pharmacists enrolled in a Doctor of Pharmacy program in New York State (NYS) completed a survey based on PSI and perceptions of political advocacy skill scores at baseline (pre-intervention) and after (post-intervention) attending the 2022 NYS Council of Health-system Pharmacists Advocacy Week. The total PSI scale and each subscale on both pre- and post-intervention surveys used the Mann-Whitney U test to compare the mean for the post-intervention survey with the pre-intervention survey. Alpha level was set at less than .05.

Results: Forty student pharmacists completed the pre-intervention survey, while 23 students completed the post-intervention survey. The individual mean PSI score was 5.43 pre-intervention and 5.75 post-intervention. Student pharmacists’ perception of advocacy skills was comparable in the pre- and post-intervention surveys. Student pharmacists perceived significant improvement in networking ability post-intervention, based on the PSI subscale.

Conclusions: A face-to-face legislative visit demonstrated improvement in networking ability among student pharmacists, however, larger studies are needed to determine the overall effectiveness of a real-world legislative visits in developing advocacy skills of student pharmacists for a lasting impact.