Hi everyone,
1. Yes, there are many international pharmacists who are doing Pharm.D degree, or master’s degree in the USA. Some of them graduate outside the USA. (Undergraduate level). This group is considered Foreign Graduates. According to NABP, FPGEE= Foreign Pharmacy Graduate Equivalency Examination, we tried to avoid the word, “foreign" as we discussed before in another thread, "Let's form legal organization."
2. Regarding to hyphen, we need to identify ourselves clearly, so we separate US from our name. There are many International Pharmacist Graduates in other countries, such as U.K., Canada, and Australia. The reason we put US with Hyphen, is that we want to be specific that we are Foreign Graduates or International Graduates located in the USA. We need the readers to understand the meaning of US and not mix US with other letters in the abbreviation. Even though Trav and I graduated from American universities, we consider ourselves Foreign or International Pharmacy Graduates. When I was in school in the US, my group has an association. I ran the association as well. The end of the association was identified by my school name, just to be specific that it is an organization in my school.
In this context, we need to clarify ourselves that we are located in the USA. As a matter of fact, a while ago, we started with the word, Foreign Graduate as NABP calls and identifies us, but all of us agree that we are not aliens. We should avoid the word, “Foreign” but we should substitute it with "international."
We differentiate our individuals from others by using EE number or pharmacy license number, which is given by NABP. That is the root of the word. We discussed about this organization since 2004 but we did not talk about it seriously. Now, we have planned and it’s time.
3. About abbreviation, it doesn’t matter if the abbreviation is repetitive in a different field. I don’t care if our name or abbreviation is going to be the same as an engineering company or a software company since we are not dealing with these companies much but if we do
PR in newspaper, or TV, or radio, it is better if we do have a unique name among others in the pharmacy field or nothing repetitive with other associations in pharmacy such as the Association of Indian Pharmacists in America (AIPHA) or the Indian Pharmacist Association in CA (IPG-CA) as we’ve talked before about the name or abbreviation of the organization. The abbreviation should be easy to remember and recognize.
For example, if people vote for IPG-US, people in pharmacy field should be able to guess easily that IPG means International Pharmacy Graduate and US means United States. If IPGO-US is selected, GO sounds positive to me as well. In the Pharmacy field, IPG is a common name for International Pharmacy Graduate. IP is also a short name as well, pretty close to IPG. IPharm is clearly explained and easy to understand.
For me, any name does not matter to me, as long as it is related to International Pharmacist/Pharmacy Graduate. The problem is that if I added another option right now, what are we going to do with those who already voted. They could not change the options. We discussed about alternatives of names a week ago. We had better move forward. Time is running out.
In the future, we may have to deal with professors in universities, government, immigration, media, people in medical and nursing professions, patient, and public. The easier the name can be recognized, the better. We may hold hands with American Pharmacist Association to solve pharmacist shortages. Ideally, our pharmacists now have no time to talk to patients.
Why? There are not enough pharmacists working in the system, not because there are not enough pharmacists but many foreign pharmacists who are qualified to work but cannot work. The bottleneck is there. We can see it clearly from outside but no one speaks out loudly. The problem was told from one side of story to another but no one does anything about it. How can we as individuals deal with it? My friends complain that they have to work 10 days straight. Some days, they are required to work two shifts because their co-workers are sick. Will this situation keep going on and on?
Please read this web site to get an idea of our association. This is the web site from International Medical Graduate (IMG). We have similar ideas.
California Dental Association - Internationally Trained Health Professionals
In sum, only individuals who are verified the status by NABP are able to be a members of our association.
However, if NABP wants the FPGEC certificate program to be tougher and tougher, some of us may communicate with each other and move to Canada.
Check this out:
http://www.pharmacists.ca/content/ab...mmigration.pdf
Sannoun,
Thank you for the suggestion. We already put the options in the poll. We brainstormed about the names a week ago. If we change after people already voted, it is going to be a big mess.
Cheer!
Knok
P.S. Please convice your friends to come to vote. Please feel free to give your opinion why you select your option.
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