Harvey A.K. Whitney Award Lectures

Rita R. Shane, Pharm.D., FASHP, FCSHP

Rita Shane is director of pharmacy services at Cedars- Sinai Medical Center, a 950-bed acute and tertiary care teaching institution in Los Angeles, California, and Assistant Dean, Clinical Pharmacy Services, at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), School of Pharmacy. She is responsible for more than 300 staff members. Dr. Shane’s goal is to ensure that wherever patients need care, there is a demand for pharmacists to ensure optimal management of medications.

Over the years, Dr. Shane has been recognized for her passion for the profession. In 2007, she received the California Society of Health-System Pharmacists (CSHP) Pharmacist of the Year Award and the Distinguished Service Award from the ASHP Section of Pharmacy Practice Managers. Dr. Shane was the 2005 recipient of the ASHP Distinguished Leadership Award and the 1995 recipient of the John Webb Visiting Professorship in Hospital Pharmacy for management excellence.

Dr. Shane is a coinvestigator in two research studies in collaboration with the UCSF School of Pharmacy and approved by the California State Board of Pharmacy to demonstrate the safety and importance of allowing technicians to check technicianfilled medication cassettes in hospitals. She also worked collaboratively with CSHP to author language in support of this regulatory change, which was approved by the State of California effective in January 2007. Dr. Shane was coinvestigator of a 2000 National Patient Safety Foundation Research Award to study the impact of dedicated medication nurses on the rate of medication administration errors in a randomized, controlled trial, the results of which were subsequently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Dr. Shane served as the U.S. facilitator at the Global Conference on the Future of Hospital Pharmacy held during the 68th Congress of the International Pharmaceutical Federation and was responsible for reviewing the international literature on medication administration. She was one of the investigators in a multicenter study of medication errors detected by emergency department pharmacists, which was published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Throughout her career, Dr. Shane has participated on committees and task forces at the state and national levels; she was a member of the American Hospital Association Committee on Health Professions and the National Quality Forum Patient Safety Advisory Committee. She is currently the ASHP representative to the Joint Commission Hospital Professional Technical Committee. She has made presentations at local, state, national, and international meetings and has published over 75 papers in the pharmacy literature, including 1 of the background papers for the recent Pharmacy Practice Model Summit.