Millennials demand a new approach in pharmaceutical training

Panellists at the second National Pharmacy Conference considered the changing profile of pharmacy students; the benefits and challenges of inter-professional education; the importance for producing well-rounded healthcare professionals by integrating science and practice and understanding learning styles and adapting teaching methods accordingly.

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Opening the conversation, University of Toronto Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy associate professor and associate dean of education, Dr Lalitha Raman-Wilms said the profession had evolved significantly in the past decade with a shift to pharmacists’ direct involvement in patient care.

Professionally, there were pockets where healthcare professionals worked collaboratively for an effective, efficient outcome. She said this collaboration would continue evolving as pharmacists played an increasing role in healthcare delivery.

The Lancet Commission research released in 2010 showed health professional education would transform to strengthen the healthcare system for an interdependent world. Specifically, healthcare professionals were being taught to mobilise their knowledge and critical reasoning for patient-centred healthcare.

Raman-Wilms said educators must recognise today’s students, typically millennials born between 1980 and 2000, as first-generation digital natives with significantly different priorities and expectations from previous generations.

“They want meaning and purpose to their learning, while those already working have an increased focus on the work-life balance that differs from the “hard work ethic” of their parents and grandparaents,” she said.

Echoing those sentiments, Tshwane University of Technology pharmaceutical sciences head of department, Dr Gill Enslin, said ensuring students reached their potential demanded an understanding of different learning styles – visual, auditory and kinaesthetic – that drove them. Learning had to be linked to meaning as students are unwilling to accept the curriculum without knowing the context and reasoning.

That required educators to use appropriate teaching and learning methods including traditional lectures, blended approaches, technology and project-based learning. From the student perspective, assessments, while necessary, had to be relevant; educators had to accept mentorship roles; the education had to integrate practical work experience and students had to be responsible for their own learning.

Chicago-based Accredited Council for Pharmacy Education International Services director, Michael Rouse, said the escalating costs of healthcare and increased focus on patient safety were driving the global shift towards inter-professional education. While it was an issue initially mooted by the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1972, there had been substantial barriers to its implementation, specifically from medical arenas unwilling to change the status quo.

These arguments include crowded curriculum schedules, increased costs with few incentives, a separation of professional programmes within university campuses and across universities and a lack of leadership support for collaborating with different medical fields.
“The reality is when the healthcare system operates on a fee-for-service model and not payment for a collaborated team, there will never be change towards a collaborative approach to healthcare. In teams people have to work together in pooling their skills and spending the dollars holistically rather than in silos,” he said.

Rouse recognised the US still has pockets of excellence in its collaborative approach, and there has been change. Courses on ethics, finance and the US healthcare system were incorporated into the curricula for students across the medical fields of study.

The University of Sydney faculty of pharmacy dean and professor of pharmacy, Professor Iqbal Ramzan, said the current healthcare approach demanded a pharmacy curriculum that balanced science and practice. That required delivering an education encapsulating current and future innovations and recalibrating the curriculum to accommodate the changing professional practices and healthcare needs.

Pharmacists were ranked second only to nurses in the community’s eyes in terms of trustworthiness, ethics and professionalism, but Ramzan questioned whether that was a genuine belief that they provide the best knowledge on drugs or if it was due to their approachability, free service and availability.

He warned the profession faces digital disruptions including mobile internet use, automated robotic systems, the internet of things, geonomics, medical advances and 3D printing that will change the way in which pharmacists deliver their services and interact with patients.

Robotic dispensing paves the way for more pharmacy technicians and will allow pharmacists more time for hands-on patient interaction rather than dispensing duties. However, there was also the demand for life-long learning as the number of complex biologic molecules came to the market.

“We need to consider (students’) learning practices and preferences to best teach them, as they will be the ones taking the profession into the future,” Raman-Wilms concluded.