At the end of January, University of Rhode Island professor of pharmacy Matthew Lacroix was named a fellow by the American Pharmacists Association for his contributions to the association and the profession.
Lacroix is the director of accreditation and assessment for URI’s College of Pharmacy. He has been involved in policy development, is a committee chairman, helped to form new guidelines to measure student effectiveness within the College of Pharmacy and used his roles to fight on behalf of pharmacists.
“I work with our undergraduate, graduate and professional programs to prove to internal and external stakeholders that the learning that the students have is occurring,” Lacroix said.
Lacroix received this award because of his service to the profession and the association. Within the APhA, he is involved with policy development, said Lacroix. He has also served roles as a delegate, committee member and committee chair for the APhA.
“I’ve worked extensively with state organizations as well to increase the scope and fight for pharmacists as part of the state association, where I was president during COVID,” Lacroix said.
In addition to his service with the APhA, he also does service with the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and the Kappa Psi Pharmacy Fraternity at URI, Lacroix said. As the advisor for the fraternity, Lacroix has helped lead the fraternity’s national development program.
With his new role, Lacroix plans to continue working on policy development, specifically regarding pharmacists being able to provide cognitive services.
“Cognitive services are those services that the pharmacist is behaving more as what you see as a doctor, medical doctors or physician’s assistant” Lacroix said. “They are doing a patient assessment and they’re managing the medication, doing dose adjustments, they’re doing point of care testing.”
The hope is if pharmacists are able to provide these services, patients could just go to their pharmacists to be tested for an illness, such as the flu and prescribed medication, Lacroix said. This initiative could also be used for birth control and HIV medication.
Lacroix said that he is excited and that it recognized all that he has done within the association and college over 20 years.
“The group I’m being inducted with are people that I’m friends with and I always look at as people that do outstanding work, so to be part of that group is a really cool honor,” Lacroix said.
Clinical Professor Jeffrey Bratberg was Lacroix’s chief nominator for the award. The support of the College of Pharmacy helped him to achieve this award, Lacroix said.
“On behalf of the College, we are proud of Matt Lacroix’s many professional accomplishments regionally, and nationally,” Dean and Professor of Pharmacy Kerry Grant said.
Through his work within the field of pharmacy, Lacroix has helped not only make changes within the College of Pharmacy at URI but also has helped develop policies that benefit pharmacists across the state.