Developing core competencies for pharmacy graduates: The Lebanese Experience
Objectives
Nowadays, new roles are emerging in the pharmacy profession, all increasingly focused on competencies and skills. Adopting competency-based educational designs prepares pharmacists for their societal role, ultimately leading to improvement of health care and patient safety. The Lebanese Order of Pharmacists (OPL, the official pharmacy association in Lebanon) took the initiative of developing a pharmacy competency framework with the ultimate goal of standardizing pharmacy education at all universities, and appointed a subcommittee within the scientific committee – the Academic Board – to achieve this task.
Methods
The work started using a primer developed by a group of academic instructors, who drafted the competencies for Lebanese pharmacists based on international reference documents from various parts of the world. The Academic board reviewed, streamlined and validated the suggested primer.
Results
Our work distributed competencies over seven axes: fundamental knowledge, professional practice, personal skills, supply of medications, safe and rational use of medications, pharmaceutical public health competencies, and organization and management competencies. These results are expected to homogenize basic pharmacy skills, improve the level of pharmacy graduates, and start a dialogue and a partnership between academic institutions, health care organizations and other pharmacy practice institutions, to address the training needs of the healthcare workforce.
Conclusion
The results of this project are a first step towards providing information on human resource planning and professional development of the pharmacy workforce, and pave the way for future studies to gather new evidence in this area. This initiative is expected to ensure high-quality, team-based delivery of care by pharmacists that is imperative for improving patient care.
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Posted 20 Jan, 2020
Developing core competencies for pharmacy graduates: The Lebanese Experience
Posted 20 Jan, 2020
Objectives
Nowadays, new roles are emerging in the pharmacy profession, all increasingly focused on competencies and skills. Adopting competency-based educational designs prepares pharmacists for their societal role, ultimately leading to improvement of health care and patient safety. The Lebanese Order of Pharmacists (OPL, the official pharmacy association in Lebanon) took the initiative of developing a pharmacy competency framework with the ultimate goal of standardizing pharmacy education at all universities, and appointed a subcommittee within the scientific committee – the Academic Board – to achieve this task.
Methods
The work started using a primer developed by a group of academic instructors, who drafted the competencies for Lebanese pharmacists based on international reference documents from various parts of the world. The Academic board reviewed, streamlined and validated the suggested primer.
Results
Our work distributed competencies over seven axes: fundamental knowledge, professional practice, personal skills, supply of medications, safe and rational use of medications, pharmaceutical public health competencies, and organization and management competencies. These results are expected to homogenize basic pharmacy skills, improve the level of pharmacy graduates, and start a dialogue and a partnership between academic institutions, health care organizations and other pharmacy practice institutions, to address the training needs of the healthcare workforce.
Conclusion
The results of this project are a first step towards providing information on human resource planning and professional development of the pharmacy workforce, and pave the way for future studies to gather new evidence in this area. This initiative is expected to ensure high-quality, team-based delivery of care by pharmacists that is imperative for improving patient care.