American Pharmacists Month: Alan Corley Discusses Importance of Pharmacy to Patients

Alan Corley, owner of Corley Pharmacy in Greenville, Tennessee and nominee for Cardinal Health's Community Leadership Award, discussed what the pharmacy profession means to him personally and its value to the rest of the community in an interview with Pharmacy Times®. Corley also explains the work he and his constituents underwent to construct East Tennessee State University's College of Pharmacy.

Pharmacy Times: What is the value of the pharmacist to you personally and to the overall health care system?

Alan Corley: The value is kind of, it is being a resource for patients and other health care providers as well. We have long been trusted by most of our health care providers. They call us with questions. So that's very rewarding, and I think it's an important service that we can provide to the community that often they don't really know anything about. We have a unique knowledge and skillset that allows pharmacists to add value to the entire health care system. And finally, finally, more and more people are realizing that. And you know, in a lot of places, like a small town, Greenville, Tennessee, that's been going on for a long time. A lot of it, a lot of things that are now becoming kind of mainstream, we've done for a long time. We probably didn't get paid for it, and we probably didn't get recognized for it, but we have provided those services for a long time, and I'm just excited that now we can finally be recognized and paid for a lot of that,

Pharmacy Times: With the role of the pharmacist growing, what is the importance of pharmacists for the patients and the community?

Corley: Well, I'm excited about these new roles. Like I said, I can remember nearly 50 years ago, when I was in pharmacy school, our professors saying, you know, “Won't be long ‘till you get paid for what you know, not for what you do.” Well, it's taken a long time, but we're getting there. We're getting there more and more. And you know, we've always at our pharmacies, tried to be early adopters of new activities; immunizations, LTC, compounding, collaborative practice agreements, test-to-treat, direct medical billing, all those things. So again, we continue to improve our importance to the community. I think, you know, COVID was obviously a bad thing, but COVID really, I think let pharmacy shine and proved to a lot of people, communities and payers and governments, the value that pharmacists can add to the health care of the community. Often, that's in a much more convenient and accessible way than getting it from some other health care provider.

Pharmacy Times: How are you celebrating American Pharmacists Month this year?

Corley: Well, we always treat our technicians to a home cooked meal on Pharmacy Tech Day; my wife and I do the cooking. So, that's kind of fun. Most of the time. Usually turns out pretty good. And this month, you know, is the month we typically do a lot of our off-site immunization clinics. We try to have speaking engagements at senior groups or community groups. We have ads in the paper. We do digital marketing, digital media marketing, to recognize pharmacy, our pharmacists, and our employees.

Pharmacy Times: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Corley: Well, I appreciate this opportunity. I guess the thing I add is, with my perspective on having been doing this for nearly 50 years now, is I think we've made great strides, and I think we're training great pharmacists now, and we're training them to do things that we weren't trained to do. Some of us learned to do them, but we certainly weren't trained to do them. And I just hope we keep that up, keep advancing what pharmacists can do, keep proving our value to the health care community and to our patients.

For many, many years, the only college of pharmacy in Tennessee was in Memphis, Tennessee, which is 450 miles from here. So, what would happen? We had a big shortage of pharmacists around here, but what would happen is, you know, I'd get high school kids and undergrad kids working in my pharmacy. Get them excited about pharmacy. They go to Memphis to go to pharmacy school, and they never came back. You know, the girls would get married, or the guys that get a job or whatever. And we just had a, you know, a brain drain of good pharmacists around here after we'd done a lot of work to train them as they worked during school. And if they didn't go to Memphis, most of them around here went to Atlanta, which is several miles, or to Birmingham, which is several miles. So anyway, we just didn't have anywhere close. And honestly, a lot of the pharmacists that we were getting as students or as pharmacists – they're great pharmacists, were trained great as pharmacists – but they didn't really know much about independent community pharmacy, and that's my heart. So a lot, several, of the local community pharmacists in our area decided we need to try to do something about that.

Number 1, we had a big shortage of pharmacists, so we needed a way to try to get them here and keep them here. And number 2, we had a lot of community pharmacy around here, compared to Memphis or Atlanta or Birmingham. So, a lot of those kids, it wasn't always their fault. They didn't have opportunities for rotations in community, independent community pharmacies in those big cities. So, we put together a steering committee and started working, and the state told us they were not going to provide any funding. Governor Phil Bredesen, at the time, said, “Okay, I'm tired of listening to y'all.” He said, “If y'all can raise $50 million in 90 days, you can start this school.” Well, we did it in 58 days. So the whole community supported it, about 25 years before that, the same kind of thing happened with the medical school up here, and the whole community saw how it raised the level of health care in the area by having that medical school here, and that was part of our selling point, is we're going to do that again if we can have a pharmacy school here. So, we started in 2007, graduated our first class in 2010, and are nationally recognized College of Pharmacy here now at the East Tennessee State University (ETSU) Gatton College of Pharmacy. So, I think that's a good example of how, if you work together, you have a need, you work together, and you get the whole community behind you, you can make something like that happen.