Standardized Assessment of Pharmacists' Patient Care Competencies:

Abstract

Assessing the ongoing competence of practicing health care professionals requires regulators to balance complex demands of governments and the public, as well as interests and concerns of practitioners. A proliferation of models has evolved across professions and jurisdictions. In this article, we report on a model utilizing standardized assessment using best-practice measurement techniques and methods for evaluation of ongoing (i.e., post-registration) clinical competencies in the profession of pharmacy in Ontario, Canada. This model involves categorization of the profession into an active patient-facing and non patient-facing register, implementation of a learning portfolio requirement to replace mandatory continuing education credit accumulation, and the use of standardized assessment techniques, such as a multiple-choice test of clinical knowledge and an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) of clinical reasoning and interpersonal skills. Lessons learned from the development, implementation and retrospective analysis of almost two decades of data from this program can provide regulators in diverse professions and different jurisdictions with tools for standardized assessment of patient care competencies.