Multifaceted Strategy That Improves Students' Achievement of Entrustable Professional Activities Across Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experiences.

OBJECTIVE: To outline an approach to help students achieve Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) entrustment during a sequence of Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experiences (APPEs) by implementing longitudinal monitoring and individualized intervention and remediation strategies. METHODS: Using the recommended EPAs within the core APPEs (acute care, ambulatory care, community, institutional), students were expected to achieve entrustment on all EPAs by graduation. A longitudinal monitoring approach, using an "EPA report card," was implemented to continuously identify students at risk of not meeting the EPA requirement of "Level 3" entrustment (perform with reactive supervision). Individualized interventions, including proactive outreach and in-sequence remediation, were incorporated into the APPE core and elective sequence to help ensure all students were entrusted by the end of APPEs without requiring further end-of-year remediation to graduate. RESULTS: For the graduating classes of 2023 and 2024, 12% (8 of 69) and 16% (12 of 75) students, respectively, were identified as at risk of not meeting EPA entrustment. Proactive outreach, in-sequence remediation, or a combination of both strategies, were used to enhance learning and EPA performance. As a result, all students achieved "Level 3" entrustment on the deficient EPA(s) by the end of the APPE sequence. No student required further end-of-year remediation to graduate. CONCLUSION: Utilizing a multifaceted strategy provided timely, real-world practice opportunities to improve the students' achievement of EPAs across the APPE curriculum and decreased the need for end-of-year remediation and potential graduation delays.

A Program to Prepare Clinical Pharmacy Faculty Members to Use Entrustable Professional Activities in Experiential Education.

Objective. To describe the design and evaluation of a program implemented to ready clinical faculty members to use entrustable professional activities (EPAs) for teaching and assessment in experiential education. Methods. The school adopted a set of EPAs for faculty members to implement in advanced pharmacy practice experiences (APPEs), and then delivered a two-session faculty development program to ensure faculty members' readiness to implement the EPAs. To determine the success of the faculty development program, qualitative analysis of the moderated discussion held during the program was conducted, post-program and follow-up surveys were administered, and the results of the pilot implementation of EPAs were analyzed. Results. Eleven faculty members participated in the development program, and 10 of them completed the pilot implementation of EPAs and the follow-up survey after completing three APPE blocks. All faculty members responded that the program prepared them to apply what they learned about EPAs to their practice setting in both the post-program and follow-up surveys. In the follow-up survey, 80% of faculty members reported that they were confident in correctly applying what they learned from the program to the EPA pilot, and 100% answered a hypothetical application question correctly. Forty students participated in the pilot implementation of EPAs. Of these, 95% were directly observed by faculty members before making an entrustment decision, and 100% received feedback on their performance. Conclusion. The faculty development program was effective in preparing faculty members to implement the EPA framework in experiential teaching and use the entrustment rubric.

Insights from a capstone workshop: An investigation of soon-to-be pharmacists' readiness to provide culturally competent pharmaceutical care.

INTRODUCTION: This study investigated readiness of soon-to-be pharmacists to provide culturally sensitive patient-centered care through administration of a capstone workshop. METHODS: The workshop was delivered in 2017 and 2018 and consisted of a pre-survey, a didactic lecture followed by group discussions of Worlds Apart cases, and a post-survey. The surveys contained knowledge questions and perception statements. Results were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Group questions were aligned to constructs from Campinha-Bacote's Model of Cultural Competence. The percentage of groups with correct answers was calculated. RESULTS: Both cohorts significantly increased their knowledge by the end of the workshop (p = 0.007, 2017; p < 0.001, 2018). Significant increases in respondent agreement to perception statements were also observed post-workshop. The percent of correct group responses varied by construct within the cultural aspect, between the aspects for each year, and between years. The evaluation of overall cultural readiness yielded the lowest results. CONCLUSION: This research revealed the necessity and value of the capstone workshop. Significant improvements in meeting cultural competence standards were observed upon completion of the exercise. Alignment of group discussion questions to Campinha-Bacote's Model of Cultural Competence constructs was useful in augmentation of assessment armamentarium as it unearthed gaps in cultural competences of pharmacy graduates. Further multi-institutional research aimed to generalize the findings of this study is highly desired.