Pharmacy Practice Lab Redesign

The College of Pharmacy is embarking on one of the biggest curricular revisions in the past decade by creating a Pharmacy Practice Lab sequence spanning all six semesters of our didactic program. The course series will combine content from seven existing courses in order to decrease redundancy and duplication to create increased alignment and reinforcement. Rather than students learning content within “the silo” of a single course, students will be required to retain and apply their knowledge and skills throughout the entire curriculum. The new lab series will be implemented with first year pharmacy students starting in Fall 2020. The labs will be designed for PharmD students to gain hands-on experience through competencies focusing on the Entrustable Professional Activities required of graduating PharmD students. Each weekly lab session will feature activities focused on providing patient-centered care paired with longitudinal threads of communications, the patient experience, cultural competence, and law and ethics. By integrating the labs, faculty will collaborate to create the best experiences for students and decrease the redundancy of activities happening in their individual courses. By focusing on the Entrustable Professional Activities, we ensure that the experiences will help to produce practice-ready pharmacists. By weaving the longitudinal threads in each course, topics will be reinforced at the appropriate learner level that progresses throughout the curriculum. By decreasing the number of labs, we anticipate that both student and faculty well-being will improve as both will be required to attend labs less frequently.