Emerging Innovations and Professional Skills Needed Within Pharmacy Curricula

Abstract

To ensure students are prepared for the rapidly evolving world of health care, curricula must be aligned with emerging innovations, as well as professional skills likely to influence students’ abilities to be successful. At the 2019 annual meeting of PharmAlliance institutions, we asked experts to identify innovations and professional skills necessary for the future of pharmacy practice. Experts identified a wide range of topics, including personalized and precision medicine, digital health, interprofessional collaboration, clinical decision making, and overcoming complexity and ambiguity. While these findings are useful for informing curriculum content, we must also commit to ensuring our pharmacy curricula are emerging, forward thinking, and effective at preparing students for the challenges in health care.

A Randomized, Crossover Pilot Study of a Novel Web-Based/Mobile Platform for Collaborative Small Group Practice in Therapeutic Reasoning

“… 15 , 19 - 21 For example, one study reported <30% of pharmacy students felt a computer simulation program was helpful for applying knowledge in a timely manner or developing a therapy plan, despite an improvement in student performance with more frequent use of the program. 20 Because this information seeking skill is a realistic feature of using electronic health records and because using electronic health records optimally is increasingly a skill needed by pharmacy graduates, 4 , 22 this is likely a frustration that should be discussed openly in case preparation and debriefing. Students should also be made aware that learning therapeutic reasoning within a realistic information gathering setting can promote stronger context-learning and therefore may better prepare students for pharmacy practice.…”

Impact of a Digital Tool on Pharmacy Students’ Ability to Perform Medication Reviews: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…The rising popularity of digital health tools in everyday practice has led to numerous considerations to introduce the topic of digital health into the curriculum of health care professional students [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ]. Since the use of digital health tools has been increasingly established among pharmacists for several years, there are already initial approaches or demands to implement digital health topics in the pharmacy curriculum in countries outside of Germany, especially in the United States and Canada [ 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ].…”