Season of Changes in the Retail Health Industry

Dear Colleagues,

I can’t believe that winter will be upon us shortly, as we enter the hustle and bustle of one of the busiest times of the year. The colorful leaves falling from the trees and the dipping temperatures are our annual reminders that cold and flu season is on its way and our clinics and pharmacies will soon be flooded with ailing patients.

Throughout the year, including at the annual Convenient Healthcare and Pharmacy Collaborative (CHPC) meeting, we work tirelessly to provide you with educational and clinical updates to prepare each of you to tackle this time of year so that you can continue to provide accessible, affordable, high-quality care. As you know, colds and the flu can impact each patient differently depending on their overall health and any chronic conditions. I applaud your amazing efforts to continually support, educate, and treat patients and consumers.

In addition to arming you with education and tools, the Convenient Care Association (CCA) is dedicated to strengthening the partnership between advanced practice provider programs and retail health, and ultimately to developing and strengthening the provider workforce. At the last CHPC in July, CCA convened a Retail Health Workforce Think Tank on “Creating Effective Experiences for Future Retail Health Clinicians.” The overall objective was to collectively identify methods to foster growth and opportunity for providers and the convenient care industry, including innovative ways to educate advanced practice nurses and other providers about retail-based health care, and to use retail-based convenient care clinics as both clinical training sites and venues for employment.

The recommendations and next steps that came from that productive discussion include the following:

1. Develop clinical opportunities, including formalizing the preceptor process;

2. Develop postgraduate programs, including steps for onboarding new graduates and short-term fellowships;

3.Foster provider connections, such as facilitating relationships with clinicians in other locations and emphasizing the value of interdisciplinary care teams;

4. Encourage standardization to streamline the creation of partnerships between educators and clinics;

5. Support graduate nurse education and advocate for funding to support these efforts;

6. Improve messaging about the retail health industry specifically around scope of practice, new graduate appeal, partnerships and industry-specific needs; and

7. Generate workforce data.

To read the full report, please see the online version of this letter at ContemporaryClinic.com. As we move into 2017, I wish you all a happy holiday season and a happy new year!

Thank you for all that you do!

Very truly yours,

Tine Hansen-Turton, MGA, JD, FAAN, FCPP

Executive Director

Convenient Care Association

Tine Hansen-Turton serves as the founding executive director for the Convenient Care Association (CCA), the national trade association for the over 2000 private-sector retail clinics industry, which serves millions of individuals with basic health care services across the country and has been coined by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen as a “disruptive health innovation.” She assists CCA with business and programmatic strategy, development, coordination and implementation, policy development, and state and national advocacy.