Pharmacy Daily | COVID experience key to education

PHARMACY training programs around the globe need to embrace the lessons learned during the COVID-19 crisis to ensure they are prepared for future pandemics, an International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) webinar heard last week.

University of Otago Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs, Associate Professor Kyle Wilby, said there was a need to develop an "international consensus document" to determine "what it is that students can do in terms of clinical placements" during a pandemic and "at what level they may occur".

"As we move out of the acute COVID phase really what we really need to think about is sustainability, and its that aspect around workforce development and normalisation," he said.

"We hope that there's not a pandemic next year, that there's not a pandemic in five years, [but] we don't know if that's going to happen or not.

"Now that we have this experience with COVID-19, I think it's really important that we build on that experience and come together as a profession [on student placements]."

He added the profession needed to consider how they assess students in the future.

"I've been working with [organisations in] a couple of different countries - we've talked a lot about virtual experiential rotations and assessment tools.

"We need to adapt how we're assessing our students and that will really help with [getting] their buy-in and their confidence without programs moving forward, so being assessed in our standard communication rubrics in a Zoom space... is not quite the same, and it could actually be disadvantaging them.

"So I hope that COVID-19 sparks a whole line of scholarships in Teaching and Learning, in terms of the types of assessments we're doing and looking at the different tools that we're using in order to assess students, whether it's difference in the clinical placements or in the online space in order to ensure they are really being validly assessed based on what they're actually trying to achieve."