Development and validation of competency framework for pharmacy undergraduate programs in Brazil

Abstract

Pharmaceutical education in Brazil undergoes structuring in the requirement to train professionals working in health care, providing pharmaceutical services, in contact with the patient and the community. To meet this new demand for education, an expansion of higher education arises that increasingly requires the presence of qualified teachers and in a constant process of updating. Competency-based teaching is the strategy applied to meet this demand, based on a document that gathers information on the main guiding competencies in pharmaceutical training. In view of this, the aim of this study was to develop and validate a competency matrix for pharmacy courses. For that a qualitative study was carried out with interviews seeking the opinion and experiences of teachers who work in pharmacy courses in the most different areas that generated a preliminary skills matrix, sent for evaluation by teachers in the pharmacy course in several regions of Brazil, using the Delphi method in two rounds, with a five-point Likert scale. 86 competences were obtained grouped in seven thematic domains, observing the teachers' consensus in face of the needs of the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are essential for the training of the pharmacist.