APPE unreadiness - The other side of the coin.

INTRODUCTION: Student readiness for Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experiences (APPEs) has not been explicitly defined in literature or standards. Readiness for APPEs is a programmatic requirement of all schools and colleges of pharmacy (schools), leaving schools to determine their own assessments of APPE readiness. Current literature provides no consensus on the definition of APPE readiness nor the assessments or benchmarks used to evaluate APPE readiness. Schools have an opportunity to improve efforts to identify students at risk for poor APPE performance and provide early intervention. COMMENTARY: Due to a lack of consensus, it may be easier to describe students who are not ready for APPEs than it is to describe students who are APPE ready. APPE unreadiness is defined by the authors as those who require significant preceptor instruction on foundational competencies such as knowledge, skills, and/or attitudes and therefore are unable to meaningfully engage in application-based patient care activities. By adding focus to APPE unreadiness within APPE readiness programs, pharmacy schools may be able to more readily identify and remediate students who are at risk of failing one or more APPE rotations. IMPLICATIONS: We provide four recommendations for schools to consider. These are focused on assessing APPE readiness to qualify and quantify APPE unready students. By assessing APPE unreadiness, schools can make continuous quality improvement to ensure that preceptors, sites, students, and faculty can have the ongoing confidence that APPE students are all ready to meaningfully engage on rotation.

Effect of Pharmacist Audit on Antibiotic Duration for Pneumonia and Urinary Tract Infection.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the effect of clinical pharmacists in daily audits, under the direction of an antimicrobial stewardship program, of antibiotic treatment durations for the common inpatient disease states of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and urinary tract infection (UTI). PATIENTS AND METHODS: This was a retrospective single-center cohort study that evaluated the difference in the duration of antibiotic therapy for CAP or non-catheter-associated UTI of hospitalized patients who received a daily audit by clinical pharmacists compared with patients who did not receive a daily audit. Retrospective chart review included randomly selected hospitalized patients diagnosed with CAP or UTI during preaudit and postaudit periods. RESULTS: The preaudit group had 64 patients; and the postaudit group, 51 patients. The therapy duration was 7 days in the preaudit group and 6 days in the postaudit group (P=.55). Fluoroquinolone use was reduced in the postaudit group and was significantly less than in the preaudit group (24 [37.5%] vs 7 [13.7%]; P=.007). CONCLUSION: The daily audits of clinical pharmacists may be an effective method to reduce the duration of antibiotic therapy and are effective in the reduction of fluoroquinolone use. Additional studies must be done to further investigate the effects of clinical pharmacist antimicrobial stewardship efforts.