Adapting Education to the Needs of Pharmacists and Pharmaceutical Scientists

The purpose of this chapter is to further explore how the global vision for the future of pharmacy education shared by many stakeholders and catalyzed by the launch of the workforce development goals by the International Federation of Pharmacy (FIP) was transformed into a specific cluster of academic goals. In this chapter, the expected impact of the Pharmaceutical Workforce Development Goals in academia and pharmacy education will be further explored, with a special focus on a consensual group of statements that would be become known as “The Nanjing Statements.” The chapter explores how all these factors contributed to the change of the way the pharmaceutical workforce is educated, and how the challenge is currently being met.

Implementation and Evaluation of Team-Based Learning in a Pharmacy Law and Ethics Module

Team-based learning (TBL) is an active learning strategy based on sequential stages: individual advanced preparation, readiness assurance process, and team application. When adopting this instructional strategy, planning entails consideration about organizing contents, securing the right infrastructure, forming groups, and grading students' work. The first class should be used to cover key aspects, such as explaining how TBL works and why it is being used. Facilitating TBL classes demands communication and organizational skills, in addition to content-expertise. TBL was implemented in a pharmacy law and ethics module. The perspectives of students collected through surveys were overall favorable. These perspectives, together with other favorable indicators, led to TBL maintenance until the current days.

Teaching and Learning Methods for Drug Information

Healthcare professionals, especially pharmacists, are constantly involved with drug information and should be able to properly select resources and keep updated on new literature and new tools to address a variety of drug information requests. The provision of accurate in-depth drug information requires the development of drug information skills through both didactic and experiential training programs. Considering the complexity of the drug information field and the expanding roles of pharmacists as information resources, this chapter will briefly introduce the main concepts of drug information and discuss the potential methods and challenges for teaching this subject while matching the variety of learning styles.

Building the Pharmacy Workforce of Tomorrow

The pharmacist is key in assuring a safe and effective supply of medicines, as well as their responsible use. As a direct provider of services, from primary prevention of disease to therapeutic monitoring, pharmacists work to ensure that the patient's drug therapy is appropriate, the most effective available, the safest possible, and most convenient. This chapter contextualizes the importance of aligning pharmacists' education with societal needs, considering the path to Universal Health Coverage and Sustainable Development Goal 3, and makes the case for investing in the pharmacy workforce of tomorrow. It presents a vision for pharmacy and its place in the healthcare system, linking this vision with a needs-based pharmaceutical workforce transformation program of work.

Challenges in Evidence-Based Practice Education

Evidence-based practice is a key element and indicator of high-quality patient care. Healthcare professionals must effectively acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes to gather, assess, and interpret the best available evidence in order to ground their clinical decisions. Both achieving competency and delivering instruction in evidence-based practice are complex processes requiring a multimodal approach that may include traditional lectures, interactive teaching strategies, clinically-integrated teaching strategies, active learning. This chapter will provide a brief overview of the concepts of evidence-based practice, interpretation of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, grading evidence, and recommendations' strength. For each topic, teaching strategies or methods will be discussed.

Perspectives on Learning and Teaching Science

Since birth, humans absorb information from what surrounds them. Kindergartens, schools, and universities work as institutions to insert everyone in a culturally similar environment, giving equal educational opportunities to future citizens. These institutions develop human competencies for a society enabled to feed everyone, to sustain healthcare, and to protect the environment. This effort implies educational performances, whose grounds should rely on theories of learning and different modes of teaching. Pharmacy faculties, apart from teaching, reinforcing, and updating the students' knowledge on pharmaceutical sciences, guide students towards respecting different health professionals, aware of their role as educational supporters of patients and families who use pharmacies as the closest advising and health caring places. This is especially important nowadays, with the complexity of some diseases and the rising costs of healthcare. This chapter gives an overview of pharmacy teaching and learning according to the European Association of Faculties of Pharmacy.

Clinical Research and Regulatory Affairs

Clinical research is a large umbrella, and it mainly includes the implementation of clinical studies/trials. This field is crucial to assess the value of new developments in healthcare, be it new therapeutic interventions, medical devices, or systems of care. In order to protect human rights, the implementation of clinical trials is complex and extremely costly. In this context, medicines and medical devices are strongly regulated products before and after the market authorization. So during their training, pharmacists must develop skills in the area of regulatory affairs, design and methodology of clinical trials, and other clinical studies, as well as in the management of clinical projects to be prepared for the challenges of the clinical research and market access processes. With that purpose, knowledge and skills for clinical research should be developed in association with regulatory affairs.

Bridging Pharmacy Education and Health Humanities

Pharmacy education is largely based on learning elements of disease and the corresponding elements of treatment, using the natural sciences and the biomedical perspective. While this is central for competent pharmacists in working on the research, production, and use of drugs, many professionals deal with people suffering from ill-health. Developing clinical roles requires, besides the traditional pharmaceutical knowledge, the ability to understand illness experiences from the perspectives of patients and significant others. Health humanities provide important resources to link human traits and biomedical knowledge, essential for sensitive and responsive pharmacy practice. The chapter aims to explore emerging opportunities for pharmacists' thinking and working with patients offered by the developing movement of health humanities and narrative medicine.

Relationships Between Academia and Professionals

Professional practice is regulated by associations with regulatory powers, namely the Portuguese Pharmaceutical Society (PPS). Education is regulated by the Ministry of Education, responsible for ensuring access to quality of education for all citizens across all professional spectra. Aiming to contribute to an improved continuity between education and the career pathway, from early phases to eventual specialization, the PPS, who represents the interests of all registered pharmacists, developed a new structure entitled the Education and Practice Platform (EPP). This structure includes one representative from each institution providing education in pharmaceutical sciences and all Councils of Specialty Boards of Practice. This chapter provides an overview of pharmacy education in Portugal, present the authors' view of strengths and limitation of the current educational system, and details the development of the EPP, presenting achievements to date, future plans, and expectations on the EPP's contribution on aligning education with societal needs.