Cindy Brasher, PharmD, MS, BCSCP (cindy.brasher@stjude.org), is the manager of compounding at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. In this role, she oversees compliance and assists with workflow related to nonsterile compounding, sterile compounding, and hazardous drug management for inpatient, outpatient, infusion center, and home infusion areas. She earned her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Tennessee and a master’s in pharmacy administration from the University of North Carolina while completing her health-system pharmacy administration residency at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. She continues to assist with lectures for students at both schools.
Brasher’s ASHP involvement includes serving as a past chair of the Section of Inpatient Care Practitioners (SICP) advisory group on Compounding Practice. She has been a continuous member of the SICP Advisory Groups on Patient Care Quality, Medication Safety, or Compounding Practice since 2016. Brasher served on the inaugural implementation team and faculty for the Designated Person Certificate at ASHP Pharmacy Futures. She has developed modules and recertification questions for the ASHP Sterile Compounding Certificate program and presented at the Midyear Clinical Meeting, Pharmacy Futures, and ASHP Advantage webinars. Locally, Brasher has served as the Strategic Plan committee chair and member for the Tennessee Society of Health-System Pharmacists (TSHP) for the past four years and on the Membership Engagement committee for TSHP.
Meet Cindy Brasher
My involvement with compounding has given me the opportunity to work with many areas of inpatient pharmacy: managing drug shortages, providing medications prepared in a safe, standardized way, partnering with our medication safety team to work through risk reduction opportunities, increasing regulatory compliance, and adjusting to the patients’ needs as they transition to different levels of care. The areas that are under the Section of Inpatient Care Practitioners reflect the work that I do with the help of my team. My experiences as an elementary teacher, a pharmacy manager at a community hospital, and the manager of compounding at a pediatric oncology hospital have taught me to be open to learning from others, be curious, listen to my team, and try to understand the end-user experience. Looking forward, I want to use my experiences to help guide the Section of Inpatient Care Practitioners to address how do we further harness technology to improve the work that our teams do, how do we merge standardization, stewardship with precision medicine and new therapies, and how do we advocate for unique healthcare settings to promote pharmacy services. I have served on a variety of SAGs within the Section of Inpatient Care Practitioners over the years, and I highly value the networking, learning, and work that these SAGs do. My time as chair of the Section Advisory Group for Compounding Practice further energized my desire to advocate for the work being done by our SAGs and find ways to collaborate amongst the SAGs.