Students' plan for unused prescription drugs wins approval from the governor
Josemaria Paterno, state Sen. Joe Simitian, Emiley Chang, Michael Mancuso, Sandy Holloway of Santa Clara Valley Hospital System and Joe Peraza gather in Simitian’s office in May after lobbying for the bill.
BY ROSANNE SPECTOR
Four medical students walked the halls of California's state Capitol this past May, desperately seeking state Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto). They were there for a Senate Health Committee hearing on a bill they had set in motion last year. And one of them, Josemaria Paterno, was set to testify.
"It was like your worst nightmare," said second-year medical student Emiley Chang. "It turned out we had gotten the wrong room number. We did find the Senator eventually."
With Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's signing of the bill on Sept. 30, the nightmare is all but forgotten.
The new law lets pharmacies dispense previously sold, unexpired and unopened prescription medications to patients, especially those with low incomes or severe disabilities.
The law got its start when second-year medical student Paterno proposed the project to the others in the five-member group in the Practice of Medicine course last year. Nine other states have enacted similar laws since 2001, and the students thought California should join them.
Every year California health facilities such as nursing homes dispose of as much as $100 million in medications that were prescribed to someone but never used, either because that person no longer needed or wanted the drug or because he or she passed away.
The students developed a proposal and submitted it in Simitian's "There Oughta Be a Law" contest. The annual competition invites Californians to propose ideas for new legislation. The students' proposal was one of five winners out of 129 entries.
Simitian then submitted a bill to the state senate on behalf of the students. "Many senators had the reaction I had at first: 'You want to do what?' " said Simitian. "Recycling drugs sounds strange, but Jose did a great job of explaining the concept."
The proposal seemed set to sail through the legislature without a hitch until August, when Simitian learned that the Department of Health Services was opposing it.
Paterno sprang into action, writing a letter to Schwarzenegger in support of the bill and emailing Stanford faculty, asking them to sign on. The goal was to show Schwarzenegger's administration that the bill had the approval of eminent medical experts, said Paterno.
The response was spotty. "Many didn't reply (often because they were still on summer vacation or out of the country and not checking email)," wrote Paterno in an email updating his classmates: Chang, Michael Mancuso, Joe Peraza and Sheila Ravi.
Among the responders, though, were Dean Philip Pizzo, MD, and senior associate dean for medical education, Julie Parsonnet, MD. "They were really influential," said Paterno. "After that I was able to recruit most of the other senior associate deans to jump on board."
Two days after the letter arrived at Schwarzenegger's office, the governor announced he would sign the bill.
Now that the legislation has become law, Paterno is focused on helping it succeed. "I'm really looking forward to the next step of forming a Stanford student group and collaborating with Santa Clara and San Mateo counties," he said. "I really want to help them establish successful and sustainable redistribution programs and encourage as many nursing homes and other health facilities as possible to participate."
"In the beginning, these programs are definitely going to need advocates."
For Chang, the best part of the project was seeing the fruits of their work.
She explained: "When you're doing community work, you find that you usually don't get to see a project to completion. Or the project takes many years. I tend to wonder if anything I do makes a difference. This time we got to reach a significant milestone in just about one year."