Documenting the Evolution of Hospital and Clinical Pharmacy: Remembering the Career of Joseph Oddis

This post is from Points, the joint blog of AIHP and the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. Points publishes original reflections about the history of drugs, medicines, alcohol, pharmacy, and their allied fields.

A recently published tribute to Joseph A. Oddis (1928–2021), an extraordinary organizational leader in pharmacy, offers historical insights into the transformation of pharmacist education and pharmacy practice in the United States during the last four decades of the twentieth century. The entire August 15, 2021, issue of the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy (AJHP) (which is freely accessible at the preceding link) was devoted to the memory of Oddis, the first full-time Chief Executive Officer (1960–1997) of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), who died on February 24, 2021 (note: the downloadable .pdf version of this issue may be easier to read than the web version).

Oddis’s tenure at ASHP corresponded with a period of remarkable change in the education of pharmacists and in their role in patient care. In 1960, the minimum educational standard for pharmacist education was a five-year Bachelor of Science degree that emphasized the science and technology of drug products. A few colleges of pharmacy had switched to a six-year Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) program for entry into the profession, and some offered the PharmD as a post-baccalaureate degree. In 2000, however, pharmacy education uniformly adopted a six-year (PharmD) degree program that focused on preparing pharmacists to be experts in the appropriate use of medicines—a concept generally referred to as clinical pharmacy.

Read the rest of this post by William Zellmer, AIHP Advisor for Pharmacy Outreach and the President of Pharmacy Foresight Consulting, on Points.