January 20, 2015

Four faculty were recently published in Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning, with an article titled ‘Making student pharmacists indispensable: The added value of introductory pharmacy practice experience students to patient care’.

Faculty include:

  • Paul Walker, PharmD, FASHP, Clinical Professor of Pharmacy and Director of Experiential Education, Community Engagement, and Continuing Education, College of Pharmacy; Manager of Pharmacy Patient Outcomes, University of Michigan Health System (UMHS)
  • Michael D. Kraft, PharmD’99, BCNSP, Clinical Associate Professor of Pharmacy, College of Pharmacy; Assistant Director of Pharmacy – Education and Research, University of Michigan Health System (UMHS)
  • Kathy S. Kinsey, PharmD’76, Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor; Coordinator for Staff Education; Preceptor for Introductory and Advanced Health System/Hospital Rotations; Clinical Pharmacist, University of Michigan Health System (UMHS)
  • Nancy A. Mason, BSPharm’76, PharmD’81, Associate Dean for Student Services and Clinical Professor of Pharmacy, College of Pharmacy; Clinical Pharmacist, University of Michigan Health System (UMHS)

Student pharmacists comprise an important resource that can help pharmacy expand its capacity to care for patients. Studies show that when P4 student pharmacists are involved in patient care, practice sites can gain significant clinical and economic benefits. Thus, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) and others have recommended that student pharmacists be integrated into meaningful practice roles that provide benefit to experiential education sites and their patients.

However, student pharmacists are now required to complete at least 300 hours of introductory practice experience (IPPE) before entering their P4 year. Colleges of Pharmacy have developed a variety of experiences to enable students to meet this requirement, including shadow experiences, service learning, vaccination programs, actual patient encounters in different settings. While the educational impact of these experiences on students has been assessed (through student and course evaluations, as well as student self-report), the benefit of P3 student pharmacists, whose skill sets may differ from those of P4 students, and their work to the practice site has not been well described.

The P3 students at the U-M College of Pharmacy complete two experiential education courses in the health system setting, one of which requires student pharmacists perform to admission medication reconciliation. Our retrospective study assessed the benefit of this 12-week P3 IPPE course to the practice site and patient care to gain insight into the impact these more junior students might provide.

U-M College of Pharmacy P3 student pharmacists performed medication reconciliation on 21.8% of eligible patients admitted during the assessment period, thus extending the clinical service to patients to patients who previously did not receive it. They identified potential medication discrepancies in 44%% of these patients and facilitated prescriber correction or clarification of approximately 75% of these potential discrepancies. Overall, P3 student pharmacists contributed substantially to patient care by performing admission medication reconciliation, identifying and facilitating correction of unrecognized medication issues that could have adversely impacted patient health and well-being.

Read the full article.