Educating for action: understanding the development of pharmaceutical care practitioners.

Abstract

Pharmaceutical care, a professional health care practice in which a practitioners works with an individual to understand the patient's medication needs and works to identify, prevent, and resolve drug therapy problems, was recently adopted as the mission and professional practice of pharmacy. The skills, knowledge, and ethics required in order to provide pharmaceutical care have not been defined or integrated as the foundation for pharmacy curricula. This research aimed to define the educational experiences required to provide pharmaceutical care, develop a curricular conceptual framework grounded in pharmaceutical care, and identify learning strategies to support the development of the pharmaceutical care practitioner. A five component developmental research process was used to develop the conceptual framework. Observations and interviews were conducted with seven pharmaceutical care practitioners in Minnesota. From field notes, interviews, and existing literature a prototype for the curricular conceptual framework was developed and refined based on additional data analysis and feedback from a panel of pharmaceutical care experts. The resulting curricular conceptual framework consisted of two structures: the curricular content and the curricular foundation. The curricular content is comprised of the clinical knowledge, clinical skills, and patient knowledge. The curricular foundation consists of practice standards, patient care ethics, and teaching, application, and evaluation techniques. Each conceptual framework component is interrelated and interdependent on the other components. The research findings and resulting conceptual framework provide the initial, required components for the development of a pharmaceutical care based curriculum.