Increasing access to care for rural veterans through intensive hands-on-training of advanced practice pharmacists

Introduction The "Increasing Access to Care for Rural Veterans by leveraging Clinical Pharmacy Specialist (CPS) Providers," known as the CPS Rural Veteran Access Initiative (CRVA), focused on providing access to comprehensive medication management (CMM) for rural Veterans in the areas of primary care, mental health, and pain management. Clinical pharmacy boot camps trained CPS to accomplish this goal. Objectives The objectives of the boot camps were to address training needs ensuring consistency and quality for the provision of CMM for the CRVA CPS to increase access to care. Methods A needs assessment survey was administered to determine curriculum content. Participants completed pre- and post-boot camp knowledge assessments for the topics taught in the curriculum. An analysis was performed comparing the results before and after the training program for participants completing one pre- and one post-boot camp survey. Results There were 87 primary care boot camp attendees and 52 mental health and pain attendees included in the analysis. For primary care, 13 courses (59%) saw >= 50% growth in the number of participants deeming themselves to have a working knowledge or better from pre to post boot camp. For mental health/pain, seven courses (29%) saw >= 50% growth in the number of participants deeming themselves to have a working knowledge or better from pre to post. Direct patient care encounter tracking 6 months pre- and post-training showed an average monthly mean encounter total increase for the primary care group from 134.4 pre-training to 146.1 post-training (P = .08) and for the mental health/pain group from 124.5 pre-training to 136.1 post-training (P = .32). Conclusion Based on the results, this program was successful in accomplishing its goals of improving the participants' knowledge, especially in areas lacking practice experience. These results were found across participants in both programs. Successes seen in these programs are now serving as models for CPS training in the VA for the future.