Evaluation of Practical Training in a Hospital Pharmacy and Community Pharmacy by Students and Pharmacists

In August 2002, the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan proposed “Model Core Curriculum for Pharmaceutical Education” as a means of improving pharmaceutical education and raising it to a more advanced level to meet changing health care needs in Japan. It has yet to be evaluated in detail.All students in the 4th year at our university undergo 4 weeks of training in pharmacy practice (in hospital pharmacy and community pharmacy). Of these students, 121 were asked to make a self-evaluation regarding their understanding of the pharmacy practice and degree of difficulty of the lectures and pharmacy practice. Since the experience of pharmacy practice was given on a one-student-to-one pharmacist basis, the pharmacists (preceptors) were also asked to evaluate the students whom they had been responsible for.Overall, for hospital pharmacy practice, students gave themselves higher scores than their preceptors did. However, for community pharmacy practice, the preceptors gave higher scores than the students. We inferred from those results that the hospital pharmacists had higher expectations than the community pharmacists. Preceptors were stricter in the evaluation of attitude than students.By comparing the degree of understanding for each questionnaire item before and after the pharmacy practice, we found that students' understanding had increased as a result of the pharmacy practice. However, many students noted particular difficulty as regards items relating to communication and some students had not been able to receive training in communication in the pharmacy practice.Thus, in order for the new Japanese model curriculum to be as effective as possible, it is important that lecturers cooperate closely with preceptors regarding the content of lectures at university and items of pharmacy practice.