Clinical pharmacists training

What is the training and qualification of clinical pharmacists in Taipei Veterans General Hospital Before they are recruited in the team they need to go through prescription verification training for at least 6 months The service outcome will be evaluated periodically. As selected to the clinical pharmacist team, they will receive 3 month mentor-mentee training. The senior clinical pharmacists will be the preceptors to lead the mentee. The training courses contain basic skill in clinical services, medical record-SOAP and drug bulletin writing and oral presentation. During the first half year, they will be evaluated twice by their clinical peers and pharmacy department supervisors committee.

In terms of the qualification, we always encourage our clinical pharmacists to keep learning and improving their clinical knowledge and skills related to clinical services, education and research. Almost every clinical pharmacist get a PharmD or PhD degree. Some of them got master degree in clinical pharmacy from England or United States. Some of them are US. trained PharmD. Some of them got clinical specialty certificate from the US. For example, Board Certified Oncology Pharmacist BCOP or certified infectious disease pharmacists. Most of them are domestic certified diabetes educators or asthma educators. The following are some clinical services

provided by our clinical pharmacists: For example, they will go medical round with attending physicians regularly. In pharmacist run clinics, they will serve patient who take anticoagulants or immune-suppressants. In the collaborative clinic, they work with physicians in the same clinic. They also take turns to verify the prescriptions of inpatient and ambulatory patients. They also need to do bed side medication education for hospitalized patients which are requested by physician or nurses. In TVGH, the drug information database used in our medication safety systems are also established and updated by the clinical pharmacists. They also need to share responsibilities of teachings, research and publication. We will elaborate more detail in the following courses.

In terms of pharmacy education, it is also one of the important responsibilities for the pharmacy department in a national medical center. Every year, we receive 70 to 80 intern students from different pharmacy school in Taiwan. For postgraduate trainee, we need to train our own pharmacists, the number is around 50. We also precept some pharmacists from other hospitals. In addition, there are about 5 to 10 international pharmacy students from the US or Asian country doing their international rotations in our department. About 9 years ago, we collaborate with National Yang-Ming University in Taiwan to build up a clinical pharmacy master program. Our clinical faculty team cooperate with different specialty of physicians, train 4 postgraduate students per year.

This table lists the recent 3 years the international students from different countries As you can see, most of them are PharmD candidate from the US doing their international rotations. Some of them are intern students from Malaysia, Japan or Australia. They come to us to do their final year clinical rotations It is a good opportunity for not only students but also precepting pharmacists to have mutual learnings and cultural exchange. Here I’d like to highlight some characteristic of the collaboration

between physicians and clinical pharmacists:

We have built up multiple relationship with the physicians: They are partners in various type of pharmaceutical services, for students who are in clinical pharmacy master program, the physicians are mentors and lecturer and dissertation co-advisor. Through the mutual multi-dimensional collaboration, the strong and tight bond is built up between pharmacist and physician. It is important base for a good team work which will be patient’s best interest.