Pharmacy Students Teach in Primary Care

Abstract

Background: Senior pharmacy students at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy (DKICP) have a mandatory Ambulatory care six-week rotation known as APPE, Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience. One of the sites available for these learning rotations is at the University Health Partners of Hawai’i Medicine Faculty Practice in the JABSOM Department of Medicine. As part of their rotation in this clinic, the student does a formal presentation to the entire clinic in the last week. This student teaching experience becomes a great learning activity and serves to foster interprofessional collaboration. The audience includes Internal Medicine physicians, residents, medical students doing their 3rd year Medicine clinical rotation, as well as the staff, including the RN, MA’s, receptionist and clinic manager. Given the above information, our objective was to determine which topics the students were selecting to address in their presentations. A second object was to determine the extent to which the clinical audience found these topics useful.

Methods: In the first few of weeks of the rotation, the student self-selects a presentation topic. These presentation topics require the final approval by the pharmacy preceptor and physician partner. The selected topic must to be both relevant to the student’s career interest as well as the clinical audience. Therefore, creativity is not only encouraged, but required. This is unique in that students in other ambulatory rotations often report being assigned a specific presentation topic by their pharmacy preceptor.

Our intent was to identify and categorize the types of presentation topics that the students selected. We collected two years of data and identified major themes. In addition, we solicited feedback from the clinical staff on the usefulness and relevance of this educational initiative.

Results: Topics fell into 4 general categories which included clinical disease state management, pharmaceutical products, technology, and wellness.

Discussion: Choosing a topic to present provides a growth opportunity for professional maturity of the student. The student has a higher level of responsibility by owning his own topic and expanding his self-directed learning. Recently, additional interprofessional learning requests have resulted in student delivered clinic inservices that embrace audience engagement.

We plan to describe our evaluation of reported clinician and clinic staff feedback for the favorite, most useful and highest interest in future topics.