Abstract
Increasing need in society to provide collaborative and patient-centered pharmaceutical care has to be addressed in curriculum development. Principles of competency-based pharmacy education (CBPE) could be seen as one solution to the new professional challenges of pharmacists. At the University of Tartu (UT), the Pharmacy curriculum was updated in 2019 to introduce principles of CBPE. The aim of this study was to gather initial students’ feedback on the development of CBPE at the UT. The survey was conducted in the spring semester of the 2019/2020 academic year to collect feedback about all curricula at the UT. All 1st, 3rd, and 5th year pharmacy students (n = 67) were invited and 70.1% (N = 47) of them also participated in this study in order to evaluate the Pharmacy curriculum. Pharmacy students were more complacent with the content and less with the fixed structure of the Pharmacy curriculum. Students emphasized more theoretical knowledge and less practical and transferable skills of the competencies developed over the studies. Initial student feedback on the development of CBPE in Estonia demonstrated that theoretical knowledge needs to be more integrated with practice throughout the curriculum. In the future, more attention should be paid to the development of transferable skills, including digital skills.
Highlights
Pharmacy students were more satisfied with the selected specialty and the content of the curriculum than with its organization
Thirdfifth and fifth yearstudies students,are whose studies are previous based on the previous curriculum) that the placement year students, whose based on the curriculum) that the placement of of the subjects in the curriculum could be more logical
Except for the placement of subjects in the curriculum, the results obtained from 5th year students were placement of subjects in the curriculum, the results obtained from 5th year students were higher than the results given by first and third year students (Figure 2)
Summary
Students emphasized more theoretical knowledge and less practical and transferable skills of the competencies developed over the studies. Initial student feedback on the development of CBPE in Estonia demonstrated that theoretical knowledge needs to be more integrated with practice throughout the curriculum. Principles of competency-based pharmacy education (CBPE) covering balanced professional science-based and patient-oriented knowledge and introduced in several countries, could be seen as one solution to the new professional challenges of pharmacists [1,2,3,4,5,6]. It is important to integrate theoretical knowledge, practical skills, and professional behavior to perform as a competent specialist and use all these components dynamically in a particular professional situation [7]. The improvement in vaccination coverage and the tackling of resistance to vaccines have already shown that pharmacists have an added value in society [9,10]
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