Students highlight bright future in business planning prize

The winning team of Hunter Amende, Peggy Lok, Jordan Anderson and Tiffany Cao won with their fictitious “Know Your Genes Pharmacy” which aimed to address medication mismanagement and quality use of medicine using pharmacogenomics.

The winners were announced at the 2019 Pharmacy Connect conference in Sydney at the weekend. The two runners-up were:

• Sunscope Pharmacy – University of Auckland – Junting Wei, Charlotte Nankevill, Tayla Cherry and Caitlin Webby
• Health Key Pharmacy – University of Technology Sydney – Luke Bradford, Pauline Ngo, Jasper Ho and Naila Murbeen

These three teams successfully progressed through the rigours of the competition which commenced in May, by producing exciting and innovative business plans and then progressing through the quarter final and semi-final rounds to be named the top three teams for 2019.

For the first time the teams were also in the running for the EBOS People’s Choice award, voted by the delegates at the conference. The Know Your Genes Pharmacy team was also recipient of this award in a very close result.

The National Student Business Plan Competition is an initiative designed to promote creative entrepreneurship among pharmacy students and encourage the development of viable, innovative, pharmacist-owned community pharmacies.

The competition was open to all pharmacy schools across Australia and New Zealand, and this year’s finalists have risen to the top of the 12 entries received. The competition is an initiative of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia and is sponsored by Sanofi Consumer Healthcare (principal sponsor), EBOS (major sponsor), Gold Cross Products and Services and Pharmaceutical Defence Limited (PDL).

The support of the competition sponsors has opened many new opportunities for the young pharmacists who have taken part in this competition since 2006. The sponsorship provides $15,000 in cash prizes to the finalists in the competition, as well as the opportunity for the students to attend Pharmacy Connect 2019.