Eshelman moves to MAHEC

After being at the UNC Asheville campus since 2011, the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Asheville campus has moved to the Mountain Area Health Education Center campus.

The move allows for collaboration opportunities with UNC School of Medicine, UNC Adams School of Dentistry and UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, which all send students to the Asheville campus. Pharmacy students will now be on campus for all four years, another change starting in August.

“It made sense to us to be on the same campus with other health science schools to continue developing innovations in teaching, education and research,” said Mollie Scott, regional associate dean and professor at the pharmacy school’s Asheville campus. “We’ll work together in classes and spaces, sharing those resources on campus. We’ll break down barriers that often exist between different disciplines and model for the students what interprofessional collaboration looks like.”

The pharmacy school’s Asheville campus previously operated on a “one plus three” model. Students spent their first year in Chapel Hill and could choose to spend the other three at either the Asheville or Chapel Hill campus to complete their Doctor of Pharmacy. Now, students select their preferred campus when they apply and spend all four years in the same place, eliminating the need to move from Chapel Hill to Asheville after one year.

The new campus offers upgraded technology within classrooms and a lab where students can experiment with making creams, ointments and capsules. The new compounding laboratory is adjacent to the MAHEC Simulation Center, which provided 502 simulation programs for 14,770 participants last year. Being near this state-of-the-art center creates new opportunities for student pharmacists to apply classroom lessons and practice patient care skills in geriatrics, cardiology and opioid overdose scenarios.

These spaces and collaboration with the medical school will also encourage more student research. Currently, several students are working as research assistants for Heart-to-Heart, a randomized control trial that compares team-based care for hypertension to usual care.

“Being together supports our research endeavors, particularly around team-based research,” said Scott. “We develop new models of health care in a changing health care environment.”

Each week students will work at the free clinic, caring for patients with chronic or acute conditions and learning to work in interprofessional teams.

Eshelman’s move to MAHEC will allow for further collaboration with the UNC School of Medicine, UNC Adams School of Dentistry and the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. (Jeyhoun Allebaugh/University Development)

With the move to MAHEC, 21 students will join the Asheville campus, a much larger class than before. Michael Marks, a first-year PharmD student, chose the MAHEC campus for the interdisciplinary collaboration opportunities with other UNC health sciences students.

“I was drawn to MAHEC because of the state-of-the-art facility and opportunities to foster interprofessional relationships,” said Marks. “It’s important to understand other healthcare professions and their scope of practice to provide the best care for future patients.”

“This is a huge leap forward, and one we believe will bring lasting benefits not only to our students but to our entire community. Having the pharmacy program fully rooted on our campus enhances opportunities for true interprofessional education,” said Dr. William Hathaway, MAHEC’s CEO. “It means more collaboration across disciplines, more learning together and more shared purpose in service of patients and communities. This shift also brings even more life, energy and innovation into our UNC Health Sciences building — fulfilling its promise as a hub for rural and regional health workforce development.”

The school hopes this move will also help them assist western North Carolina as the area recovers from Hurricane Helene. Being located at the MAHEC campus, Scott said, “creates opportunities for us to do more recruitment together and highlight all opportunities that high school and college students have to stay in western North Carolina and become health care professionals trained by Carolina.”