Interprofessional education with a community fall prevention event.

Implementation of interprofessional education (IPE) among multiple professional degree programs has many challenges. Students from four health science programs: pharmacy; nursing; physician assistant studies and physical therapy participated in an interprofessional community fall prevention event. This paper briefly describes the development of this IPE opportunity and the assessment of changes on students' attitudes about IPE after participation in the event. Differing views on teamwork and professional roles are reported by professions. Positive attitudes towards interprofessional teamwork were observed after participation in the event. Based on these data, it appears that an interprofessional community service event offers a useful approach forward for incorporating IPE into the curricula of different health care programs.

Medication Education Provided to School-Aged Children: A Systematic Scoping Review.

OBJECTIVES: To characterize the educational interventions regarding prescription and nonprescription medication use for school-aged children, we systematically reviewed evidence of programs available for this age group. METHODS: Searches in PubMed, CINAHL, EMBASE, ERIC, and International Pharmaceutical Abstracts were conducted. Search terms focused on: population education, school-age children, and medications. Studies were excluded if they were specific to a particular disease state or class of medication, drugs of misuse and illicit drugs. Data extraction included study design, location, educational intervention and duration, research methods, and main findings. RESULTS: We found 14 studies representing 8 separate projects. Six projects were identified in the gray literature. Projects ranged from individual sessions to national programs. Quantitative studies showed improvement in knowledge, medication literacy, and confidence. The adoption of medication education strategies was dependent on the educator's comfort level and beliefs regarding medication safety. CONCLUSIONS: Credible medication education resources are available and have been shown to improve students' knowledge. There remains a need for multifaceted implementation and evaluation strategies. Strategies and resources are available to implement interventions in communities to address medication education in school-age children. Frameworks should be used to facilitate the implementation of effective health promotion strategies around safe-medication use for school-aged children.

Virtual reference: chat with us!

Virtual chat services represent an exciting way to provide patrons of medical libraries with instant reference help in an academic environment. The purpose of this article is to examine the implementation, marketing process, use, and development of a virtual reference service initiated at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and its three-campus libraries. In addition, this paper will discuss practical recommendations for the future improvement of the service.

Assessing the Effectiveness of an Evidence-based Practice Pharmacology Course Using the Fresno Test.

Objective. To assess the effectiveness of an evidence-based practice (EBP) pharmacology elective course to teach EBP skills using the Fresno Test (FT). Methods. Pharmacy faculty members and medical librarians developed the elective course and offered it to two cohorts of doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) students. A pre/post intervention study design was used. Seven of 12 FT items were chosen to measure specific EBP skills: Ask, Access, Appraise and Apply. Pre/postcomposite and FT item mean scores were compared using Student's t test with p<0.05 set as significant a priori. Results. Composite FT mean scores increased significantly for both cohorts. Mean scores for both cohorts increased significantly in four of the seven FT items but on different FT items. Conclusion. As a profession that commonly uses evidence-based guidelines, developing and integrating an EBP course in the PharmD curriculum is worth considering.