Experience and attitude of Malaysian undergraduate pharmacy students towards clinical pharmacy education

Abstract

Clinical pharmacy education (CPE) is an important element in the undergraduate pharmacy programmes as the pharmacy profession had changed from product-oriented to patient-oriented services. This study was designed to assess the experience and attitude of Malaysian undergraduate pharmacy students on clinical pharmacy education, to compare attitude score according to different demographic characteristics and experiences, and to identify preferred teaching and learning methods for CPE. This was a cross-sectional study conducted using an adopted and adapted questionnaire which was distributed via email. A total of 305 final year Bachelor of Pharmacy students from all universities offering pharmacy programme were recruited through convenient sampling and the mean (SD) age of the respondents was 23.03 (1.589) years. This study revealed that almost 50% of respondents started CPE in Year 3 of their study. The highest proportion of respondents spent 31- 50 contact hours per semester for clinical pharmacy courses and the biggest percentage of contact hours were spent in traditional lectures.