Common questions raised by local pharmacists

Through my experience of experiential office at Taipei Medical University College of Pharmacy. I have often encountered questions by either preceptors or future preceptors. Therefore, today, I would like to use this session to show with you common questions raised by local pharmacists, and also provide some of my insights. Number one, why should I become a preceptor? Number two, work at my site is very busy. How can I percept students? Number three, how can I become a preceptor? Number four, I have 2 students from different schools at different levels. How can I precept both of them at the same time? What problems would I encounter? Number five, the student is failing the grading standards. What should I do?

Number six, how shall I work with students who are shy and not confident? Number seven, how can I stimulate critical thinking in students? And finally number eight, how can I become a better preceptor? So, let’s start with the first question. Why should I become a receptor? Well, by the time you reach the 6 sessions in this series. you must have become very motivated by Dr. Brown. Still, I would like to share with you some of the reasons as to why pharmacists should become preceptors. Hopefully, you can share these with your peer pharmacists, and both of us we can encourage more pharmacists to become preceptors from different schools of Pharmacy.

The first reason is for pharmacists or preceptors to share their enthusiasm about pharmacy practice. We know that pharmacy practice has advanced quickly over the last couple of decades. Preceptors can share their enthusiasm about pharmacy practice and encourage students to continue developing these different roles for pharmacy. Second reason is for preceptors to passing years of experience to future generation. Even though we try very hard in the colleges of pharmacy to prepare students as much as possible. Still there are some things that students may not learn until they reach the real world experience. For example, dealing with real-world customers or real-world patients. So we hope preceptors can pass on years of experience to future generation.

The third reason is for preceptors to learn the latest advancements and transfer to students. You might be surprised by this but actually by assigning students to different assignments or doing these different reports. Pharmacists can learn from students about the latest advancement and trends. Sometimes these might be technology things or these might be some of teaching methods that they have acquired from school. By learning these advanced latest advancements and trends from students. Pharmacists can continue to develop for their own profession. The fourth reason I would like to share is that precepting experiences can actually be a good recruitment tool. Because throughout a short-term experience whether that be a 160 hours experience or 640 hours experience.

You did to observe students closely about their attitudes, their skills, their behaviors. Therefore, you might be able to recruit candidate pharmacists by identifying these good students in your own practice. Finally, I would like to share with preceptors that, giving back to the profession may also be important reason for protecting students. Because if we want to continue to develop as a profession as a important to keep teaching and keep the students engaged. Therefore, by having preceptors giving back to the profession, we can continue to advance. Question number two, work at my site is very busy. I have staff shortages, so how can I precept students? how is that even possible?

Well, we encourage pharmacists to look for opportunities to integrate learning activities and site needs. So for each different schools of Pharmacy, they might have set up learning objectives. For example, we have shared with you are learning objectives for our community pharmacy experiences as well as introductory pharmacy practice experience. Therefore, you might be able to identify learning activities that could be incorporated into your site that also meet with your site needs. To give you some examples. For example, potentially a site might be interested in developing a new service.

Maybe a new blood pressure screening service, a new lipid checking service, they can engage students in these type of services and potentially practice about how to assess the needs for this type of practice. How to set up these different protocols, or even how to carry out these different activities. These could be a good way of promoting the site and providing more direct patient care as well as giving students opportunities to learn. The second thing I would like to share is that planning is very important. Planning planning and planning is the best way of how a busy site can become a precepting site.

This requires good time management, whether that be designing a good schedule for the students, or setting up a certain teaching area or certain teaching time, teaching slots for the students spend time together as well as doing efficient jobs and in your work. Another important piece that is often a neglected is that staff arrangement. So for example, if the pharmacist may need to set aside, maybe half an hour per day, to work with the students. You need to have enough staff arrangement to cover for the work that you might be working. But by having good planning in advanced, this could be resolved in most of the cases.

So trying to integrate learning activities with site needs as well as good planning could be good reasons to help or good ways to help of pharmacist precept students at busy sites. I would also like to share with you some potential timelines that you might be able to use for your rotation preparation. By having good preparation, you could be more prepared when the students arrived and it will be less chaos when all this starts. So I would like to share that potentially, three to five months in advance might be a good time to contact the college for information, if you have not already.

We encourage the site to design their own structure program by setting up site specific learning outcomes, evaluation criteria and activities, including the specific forms that students should use. But don’t be discouraged by all these things that you need to do or the things that we encourage you to do. Instead, by having close relationships with the college, you can receive templates of all these documents. But we emphasize a lot that having site specific materials is important. Because each site might be very different from a different site. Therefore, we encouraged setting up site specific documents for all these rotations. But don’t be afraid, contact your college experiential office and we will be happy to help you out with all these documentations.

Now, when the time gets closer, say for example, around two weeks before the rotation. Make sure to be in contact with students for rotation preparation. Typically, we encourage students to be the person making the contact. So either way, but be in contact with students. So doing these contacts, you might be able to assign students some assigned readings before they arrived at the sites. So say for example, maybe diabetes is important disease state at your site. You provide nutrition counseling or maybe you provide a lot of drug therapy recommendations in terms of this disease state. Therefore, for students to learn more efficiently at your site and be able to carry out more difficult activities.

We encourage students or we encourage preceptors to assign students different assign reading beforehand. So that they can be more prepared when they arrived at the site. The second thing that is important to prepare in advance is student schedule. So what activities can they be be doing at each afternoon or each morning session? And what are the times that you would like students to make presentations or to provide some evaluations for the students? These could all be set up in a good schedule so that students could receive a more structured experience. By having a more structured experience, as you have learned with Dr.

Brown previously, students are typically much more satisfied and know how to how they can meet their learning outcomes. Finally, at least one week before the rotation, make sure to remind your staff and make necessary arrangements for your site. So that students can arrive and have a good experience at the orientation. These are for your reference, so that you can be more planned, be more well-prepared for rotations.