Dr. Nancy Gerstad of Chicago has been named the 2012 Outstanding Alumna of the Year by the College of Pharmacy.
Gerstad devoted many hours in 2012 to help the college enhance and refine an online course in obstetrics that is now available to WSU pharmacy students and is in the process of being disseminated to other students and professionals.
“We are enrolling 20 students from another college of pharmacy in the U.S., two students from a pharmacy school in Japan, and we just made the course available in February as a continuing education for professionals and we have one pharmacist enrolled,” said Associate Dean Linda Garrelts MacLean. “Dr. Gerstad’s help in preparing this course has been invaluable.”
Gerstad listened to the 27 hours of course content, developed additional content to add to the course, and prepared pre-assessment and post-assessment questions with an answer key. She traveled to Pullman in April 2013 to meet with the WSU Global Campus and record two new introductions to the course, and she prepared a marketing plan for the course that includes instructions for creating short courses from parts of the whole course to be offered to various healthcare professionals for CE credit.
The online course features presentations by the professionals who wrote the various chapters of the book, “Diseases, Complications, and Drug Therapy in Obstetrics.”
Pharmacists are often the last line of defense in preventing a harmful drug from reaching a fetus or nursing infant, says co-editor Gerald G. Briggs, an alumnus of WSU pharmacy. “Our book was designed to fill that gap.”
Gerstad was presented with the award at an evening celebration on April 19, 2013, in Spokane. She graduated from the College of Pharmacy in 1974 and went on to receive her medical degree from the University of Michigan School of Medicine in Ann Arbor. She practiced primary care internal medicine in Chicago for over a decade, and currently serves as a senior medical advisor for Integrated Care Management 3, a disease management entity focusing on life style change to improve health outcomes.