Pharmacy Students' Self-efficacy for Pharmaceutical Expertise Affects Successful Experiences as Enactive Attainments in Pharmacy Practice Experience in Japan

Abstract

Pharmacy practice experience (PPE) is essential in the six-year course of pharmaceutical education in Japan. We previously found that PPE reinforced students' self-efficacy for curriculums (SECs), leading robust acquisition and reconstruction of pharmaceutical expertise. In this study, we aimed to clarify whether students' SECs affect successful experiences as enactive attainments in PPE. We distributed survey questionnaires to the fifth-year students in Keio University in 2016-2017 before and after PPE. The students made a self-assessment of their psychological state "expect to do well" on a seven-point Likert scale for each curriculum (C1 to C18), and their successful experiences were also collected from free description type questionnaire. We could follow up 139 students. The SEC scores increased from pre-PPE to post I (p<0.001) and II terms (p<0.01). The increase in SEC scores during PPE was associated with the rate of students' successful experiences in the first-term PPE (p=0.04). The path analysis revealed the following as significant predictive factors of SECs for successful experiences: basic sciences (C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, and C6) with stand-ardizing coefficient 0.35, health and environmental sciences (C11 and C12) with 0.39, and pharmaceutical sciences (C7, C8, C9, C10, C13, and C14) with -0.51. Students in the first-term PPE tended to experience successful performance in medical professions by using their pharmaceutical expertise that they had learned. In this study, for the first time, we demonstrated that Japanese students' SECs for pharmaceutical expertise affected successful experiences, leading better outcomes of PPE.