Introduction and Evaluation of

Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experiences at One Institution

for the 6-year Pharmaceutical Education Curriculum

Sami Yang^o, Joo-Won Jung, Yoon-Hee Park, Hye-Won Han, Jae-Youn Kim

Department of Pharmacy, Asan Medical Center

[Purpose]

 This study reported the structure and implementation of an advanced pharmacy practice (APPE) in one general hospital in Korea, and evaluated the effectiveness of this program from both of the students’ and preceptors’ aspects.

[Summary]

 In 2014, the pharmacy department of Asan Medical Center began pharmacy practice experiences for the students in accordance with the curriculum of 6-year pharmaceutical education policy. At the first year, the program of advanced pharmacy practice experience (APPE) was composed of 12 different sites and each site has 5-week schedule. Each student had been matched with one preceptor and rotated total of 2 or 3 sites. At the end of the course, we surveyed both of preceptors and students in order to examine their experience of the pharmacy practice program. Students showed high satisfaction on overall quality of curricula and practice environments, but they were dissatisfied with fewer opportunities to experience the patient education or multidisciplinary team care. Meanwhile, most of preceptors complained about their workload burden and students’ excessive demands of theoretical knowledge to preceptors. To achieve more efficient allocation of preceptor resource and enhance opportunities for students to engage a various experiences, pharmacy department adopted a new APPE rotation model which is called “group scheduling” in 2015. This model integrates some sites such as ICUs, oncology parts, pediatrics, and it may enable increased collaboration among preceptors and greater continuity of educational experiences. Moreover, pharmacy department increased proportion of the patient education and shadowing of multidisciplinary team rounds on the entire schedule. As a result, the mean Likert scale of overall satisfaction of students has fairly increased (p<0.05) and preceptors responded that their mean additional time for education had decreased about 0.8 hour per day (p<0.05).         

[Conclusion]

 The improved APPE program in 2015 at this hospital has proven advantageous to both of the preceptors and students in aspects of enriching student rotations while increasing site efficiencies. Through these findings, experiential education administrators at the medical institutes will be assisted to plan more efficient pharmacy practice education program.

[KeyWords]

Student, Education, Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience, APPE