Nicole Young, Associate Professor of Pharmacy Practice
Associate Professor Young, a clinical pharmacist, researches health disparities, teaching and educational activities, and the expansion of pharmacy services in Hawaiʻi.
Posted Aug. 2, 2024
Nicole Young, an alumna of the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo pharmacy doctoral program, is an associate professor of pharmacy practice at her alma mater. Young, who is a clinical pharmacist, conducts neurologic and cardiovascular research with pharmacy students who are on rotation with her in the Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit at The Queen’s Medical Center on O‘ahu where she serves at the Community-Based Pharmacy Residency Program.
Young received her bachelor of arts in microbiology from UH Mānoa in 2009, and her doctor of pharmacy degree from UH Hilo in 2015. She went on to complete her first postgraduate year in pharmacy residency at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham, Washington. She then returned to Hawaiʻi to complete her second postgraduate year in critical care pharmacy residency at UH Hilo and The Queen’s Medical Center.
Young began teaching at UH Hilo’s pharmacy college in 2016 during her specialized residency in critical care, and became a member of the pharmacy college’s faculty in 2017. She received tenure and promotion in 2022.
- UH Hilo pharmacy alumna receives promotion and tenure at her alma mater’s pharmacy college (UH Hilo Stories, Sept. 2022)
Research on educational activities
Much of Young’s research focus and published works are on teaching and the development of interprofessional educational activities.
“I expanded my research endeavors to topics on teaching and learning for the continuous improvement of the UH Hilo pharmacy program,” she says.
Her most recent published co-authored papers are on “Interprofessional telehealth simulations for pharmacy and nursing students: development and evaluation of an online experience” (Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning , Feb. 2023); “Training future pharmacists to optimize the healthcare workforce Hawaiʻi” (Journal on Health and Social Welfare, April 2022); and “From a distance: nursing and pharmacy students use teamwork and telehealth technology to provide interprofessional care in a simulation with telepresence robots” (Journal of Interprofessional Education and Practice, March 2021).
More recently, Young has been working on obtaining funding through service contracts to expand the scope of pharmacy and faculty services. “I am currently working on obtaining a contract for providing more education to providers in the state,” she says.
Community-based research and advocacy
It was during her residency at PeaceHealth in Washington state that Young found her interest in researching health disparities among different ethnicities; her goal was to discover ways to improve patient care. Part of her work in Hawaiʻi has been the study of health disparities in Filipinos and other ethnicities among stroke patients.
“This area is, especially in Hawaiʻi, a very important area to look at to make sure that we’re treating all patients equally, and to make sure that if there are health differences that we approach the patients more individually so they get the best care that they can,” Young says.
Her research led to understanding that Filipinos hospitalized for stroke were prescribed less antithrombotic medications at discharge for stroke prevention than white patients.
“This was a surprising find,” she says, “and has led to changes in practice in our ICU [at Queen’s].”
Young says the contributions to her field that have made the largest impact include her writing testimony and advocating through the Hawaiʻi Vaccine Preventable Cancers Workgroup to help get bill HB 2553 passed.
“This bill expands vaccine access to Hawaiʻi by allowing pharmacists to order vaccinations and allow trained pharmacy technicians to administer them, something that was not done before the COVID pandemic and was temporarily allowed during the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness or PREP act,” she explains.
Currently she is working with the Hawaiʻi Pharmacists Association Government Affairs Committee to pass a bill to provide payment for pharmacist services from third-party payers, like in many other states.
Student collaboration
Young says she tries to collaborate with her students each year to allow them to present a research poster at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Midyear Clinical Meeting to help them with their pharmacy residency applications.
Along with her current work on improving healthcare for ethnic minorities and the underserved which includes expanding pharmacy services and payment for these services, Young says she is also focusing on fostering a growth mindset in pharmacy students to help them become successful pharmacists.
By Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of Keaohou and UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
