Pharmacy Education - Science topic

Respected Prof.

I can also contribute in in-silico analysis, if there is any.

Thanks

If the vials/ampoules are too small to label something simple like putting them into an alternative container that you can label easily may help. That way important information on the vial/ampoule will not be obscured. 

Dixon,

Thanks for posing the question. To put things in perspective, Pharmacy has NOT always been clinical in the sense that it is today. When I started out in the mid 80s, collaborative practice agreements were essentially non-existent. Pharmacists weren’t allowed to immunize. In most places, pharmacists weren‘t allowed to write in the chart “for liability issues”. Funny how now if a pharmacist does NOT review a patients meds, that neglect is considered liability! I worked in a behavioral health care facility in the 2000s in which pharmacists STILL did not have access to patient lab data! Yes, pharmacy has come a long way since I first started practicing but we still have a long way to go.

Pharmaceutical Care, Medication Therapy Management (MTM), and Pharmacists' Patient Care Process (PPCP) are discussed well in the Elsevier textbook Clinical Pharmacy Education, Practice and Research. Authors include global leaders in MTM and PPCP;

This is a wonderful question. I typically use focused mentoring within an inter professional team. The interprofessional team research provides a setting where students, fellows, and other trainees gain first hand experience in needed skills such as building and engaging team members, holding colleagues accountable for promised work, negotiating roles and responsibilities on a project, presentation, or paper, and handling disciplinary differences in academic support for team science, culture and communication patterns, and measures of success, .

As challenges emerge, I try to provide opportunities for discussion of both the rewards and challenges of interprofessional team work. More recently, I have been interested in developing resources for trainees in the most important skills needed for interprofessional teams.

Looking for suggestions on resouces for interprofessional training, including any curriculum development on training in interprofessional team research and any program that involve explicit training in the important knowledge and skill domains needed for interprofessional team research.

There are no guidelines or standards widely accepted for OTC medicines used in community pharmacies, as minor illnesses vary from one region to another. However, you may follow the WHO's brief guidance as you wish. In the UK, three reference books have been used by most pharmacy students and pharmacists:

1. Symptoms in the pharmacy: a guide to the management of common illness. 7th ed. Blenkinsopp A, Paxton P, Blenkinsopp J. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell; 2014.

*** This book is recommended for pharmacy students and pharmacists, as it provides many good disease and medication points, esp. when to refer patients.

2. Community pharmacy: symptoms, diagnosis and treatment. 4th ed. Rutter P. Edinburgh: Elsevier; 2017.

*** Professor Rutter is an experienced community pharmacist himself and he spent many years writing this book to meet all purposes.

3. Minor illness or major disease. 6th ed. Addison B, Brown A, Edwards R, Gray G. London: Pharmaceutical Press; 2016.

*** It is interesting to see some OTC and P medicines used for both minor and major diseases.

Hope this helps.

Dr Win

It's time to change the way we approach coughs in community pharmacy

If you know one drug is a free acid or free base you can predict what it will react with/precipitate out with in IV solution. Since some community pharmacy practices interface with home infusion, this can be a possible circumstance in which medchem would come into play.

In my opinion it is helpful to know the general structure of the compound classes to understand interactions, side effects etc. For example, if you understand, that the antibiotic tetracyclines are good chelatic binders because of their structure, you will remember more easily to warn the patient to not take it together with 2+ charged ions like Ca2+ and Mg2+. Another example are antihistaminic drugs: If you are familiar with the structure, you will realize the similarity to cholin, meaning these drugs, especially the first generation, show cholinergic action, which explains a lot of the side reactions.

So in my opinion it is important and useful to know the pharmacophore, or at least to be able to recognize and know important key elements of the structure. But of course in the time of databases and computers, which are of course used in the community pharmacy, one could argue that you don't need to know anymore. But honestly I prefer a pharmacist who is not just selling you drugs but also understands their action and side effects.

i am interested...pls provide more details

Please let me know if the references/sites below are helpful to you:

1.  A German national prevalence study on the cost of intensive care ...

https://ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/cc5952Jun 26, 2007 ... Intensive care unit (ICU) costs account for up to 20% of a hospital's ...... use and cost-generatin factors in a German medical intensive care unit ...

2.  Clinical Benefits, Costs, and Cost-Effectiveness of Neonatal - PLOS 

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000379Dec 14, 2010 ... Joshua Salomon and colleagues performed a cost-effectiveness analysis ... of all relevant factors, including ethical issues, and cost-effectiveness analyses .... Since neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) are the current standard ..... among a German preterm birth

Dennis

Dennis Mazur

In Spain, forensic microbiology is not used routinely in all autopsied cases. However, we use this ancillary examination in specific cases such as SIDS, sudden death in the young with suspected infection (e.g. meningococcal sepsis, myocarditis) and in all natural or violent deaths where the antecedents, death scenario and autopsy findings suggest an infection. We use also microbiology in cases of alimentary intoxication. The core centre of the forensic microbiology lab is located in Madrid at the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences.  

Pharmacists have long had an important,yet often unrecognized  role in primary and secondary health care. There has been studies showing that pharmacists as part of the primary health care team has led to improved glycaemic control in primary care patients. Many pharmacists,unlike doctors,  have not published studies which underly their roles in patient care and hopefully this can be changed.

Pharmacists also provide information to patients about drug use, major adverse reactions, drug interactions. However there role in compliance with medications especially in patients with polypharmacy cannot be over emphasized.

How do we get pharmacists involved? We simply ask them to be involved in quality projects and at the meeting of the heads of various departments requesting what involvement needs to be done.

I am impressed with the quality of many of the responses. And I agree fully that ethics are important and should be taught. But I am also concerned about the deteriorating quality with which pharmacokinetics has been taught over the last 40 years. Pharmacists are no longer as capable as they iused to be with regard to carefully individualized drug therapy. So - called "basic pharmacokinetics" simply repeats the obsolete practice of using linear regression on the logs of the serum concentrations.This is a total waste of time, in my view. We need to teach useful clinical PK based not on NONMEM etc., for exaample, but rather on the clearly more capable methods of nonparametric modeling and maaximally precise multiple model dosage design. And this is just as easily taught as Sawchuk Zaske. Then there is the interacting multiple model approach to acutely ill and unstable patients in the ICU. The ITAG5 workshop in Lyon this April is devoted to this, with a combination of MD's and pharmactsts. Go to www.lapk.org and click around. This is what can be done by both MD's and Pharm D's together. This, I would respectfully suggest, is what can be done NOW in pharmacy education. I am attaching one paper giving an overview of this.

Very best regards to all,

Roger Jelliffe

in addition to all the giving responses, I think pharmacists them selves have a part of responsibility; so they must work to improve their profession and take their place within the healthcare team. 

Dear Zulfan Zazuli

I recomend you a first aproach, working clinical cases that involves/show the participation of different health care professionals in the treatment/care of a patient at the eraly stages of the degree. We are doing in our pharmacy school in the first year of the degree. After in the forth year they will go to hospitals  where we will plan other activities for them with interaction with the physicians and nurses.

hi Shane, as u r developing lab component of pharmacology for biotech undergrad student, i feel "In vitro techniques using isolated tissues and organs in toxicology" can be used as one of lab experiment, i am not sure whether it is appropriate for 3 hrs lab but have a look on the link

Dear Zai...

The current definition of the ICH is not clear, in that it refers to another procedure as being permissible to add to the validation exercise in order to make the method specific .

The ICH definition of specificity

pecificity is the ability to assess unequivocally the analyte in the presence of components which may be expected to be present. Typically these might include impurities, degradants, matrix, etc.

Lack of specificity of an individual analytical procedure may be compensated by other supporting analytical procedure(s)

This probably has its roots in the preparatory work of the CPMP in developing this requirement, where both quantitative and qualitative aspects are presented. In any event the second statement in the ICH definition of specificity is at the very least unhelpful, and at its worst confusing to the practising analyst.

Hi Margaret,

Will send my publications to you this week.

Cheers,

Cherie

This article may be helpful ...they aimed to measure alpha amylase inhibitory activity ..

Dear Friends,

I will emphatically say NO!!! Not because I disagree with the concept/idea/practice of introducing "social science" material into the undergraduate pharmacy curriculum, but because it should already have been done --- not should we "start to consider". In 1973, while a student at UCSF School of Pharmacy, I came to recognize that while pharmacy said it was moving from being "product oriented to patient oriented", the academic reality was incongruent with this premise. Thus, I devised, got formally approved, found a professor to teach, and served as the TA for the first psychology course ever formally constructed for and taught to pharmacy students in the US. Seeing that this was over 40 years ago and that we now commonly agree that pharmacy is a "patient-oriented" health care profession, then these academic changes (i.e., inclusion of more social sciences) is not only good and relevant, but LONG OVERDUE!!

Sincerely,

Lou

Whether we like it or not, Pharmacognosy is not a subject of the past, but it has evolved and developed over the years to adapt itself with the changing environment, and is now fit to meet the challenges of the present and the future of drug discovery and development. Thus, the importance of Pharmacognosy in Pharmacy cannot be overemphasized. Pharmacognosy will remain to be a significant and an essential contributor to the knowledge and understanding of drugs and therapies, and thus should be an integral part of any meaningful academic Pharmacy programs world over.

Accoprding to our teaching program, we have totally 68 teaching hours of course work for the students from school of pharmacy, 4 teaching hours/weeks (two lectures). the text book is Basic and clinical pharmacology (11th edition) : Author：Bertram Katzung / Susan Masters / Anthony Trevor Press: McGraw-Hill Medical. Within this text book, 34 chapters have been selected. If you need more details regarding the name and teaching hour for each chapter I can provide you the list by your request. Also, Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, (12th Edition) Author：Laurence Brunton, Bruce Chabner, Bjorn Knollman is the reference teaching material for the teachers. Good luck.

Check whether there are published flora of Persia. With clear pictures you could the answers from the local people, after which you would be able to trace the families of the plants and their proper classification.

Thank you so much for your comments and feedback. Actually I posted the question after having realized the confusion I am referring to among pharmacists and pharmacy students which sometimes frustrates them during practice but particularly when presenting papers or embarking on small scale research on the subject matter. Please see an article by McGivney et al (2003) entitled 'Medication therapy management: its relationship to patient counseling, disease management, and pharmaceutical care' which provides a nice discussion about the terms and also look at the recent book on Medication Management Services, which we use as reference innour pharmacy undergraduate program. This reference in particular continues on the path of the first edition and provides a comprehensive coverage to the PC practice, including a section about the terms and the links between them). While terms and definitions sound too academic, I think they should be addressed, discussed, and explained to our students as early as possible lest they become sources of frustration and confusion.