College of Pharmacy to Begin Phasing In New Curriculum
| The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) College of Pharmacy has completed a redesign of its curriculum, which it will begin phasing in during the fall semester later this year. It is the first full redesign of the college’s curriculum since the 1994-1995 academic year.
The new curriculum is a response to the rapidly evolving needs of the profession, driven not only by changes in health care and education but also the role of pharmacists in patient care.
David Caldwell, Pharm.D., associate dean for academic affairs, and Chris Johnson, Pharm.D., M.Ed., associate professor of pharmacy practice, chaired the college’s committee on the curricular transformation process, with Rachel Stafford, Pharm.D., associate professor of pharmacy practice, leading the college’s curriculum committee.
“We identified four key things that answered our ‘why’ — the health care system is changing in big ways; pharmacy practice itself is changing; higher education is changing; and then the modern student, their mindsets are changing as well,” Caldwell said. “So, with all four of those things coming together, it felt like a good time for us to not just make strategic edits to our curriculum but do a pretty substantial redesign, which is what we’ve done.”
Dedicated lab time is an essential component in the new curriculum. Students will have one credit hour in the lab each semester, up until their fourth year.
The changes will be phased in gradually over the next four years. Graduation requirements for all current pharmacy students will remain the same. This fall, the incoming Class of 2029 and all subsequent classes will learn using the new curriculum.
“The Class of 2029 will be the first to have gone through all of it,” Caldwell said. “That allows us to graduate one class before our next reaccreditation [in 2030], so we’ll have data on a full cohort of students as we’re going through that new process.”
Currently, College of Pharmacy students take 32 credit hours their first year, 35 in their second year, 30 in their third year, and 42 in their fourth and final year of pharmacy school. Starting with the Class of 2029, this will change to 36 hours, 33 hours, 29 hours and 37 hours, respectively. This front-loads more didactic curriculum for new students and streamlines their fourth year.
Under the new curriculum, first-year students will focus on drug therapy, pharmaceutics and principles of pharmacy practice, as well as evidence-based medicine, ethical decision-making, effective management and leadership, and an introduction to implementation science. Those themes will be repeated with advanced classes during the second and third years. Introductory Pharmacy Practice Experiences (IPPEs) in the summers of the P1 and P2 years and fourth-year Advanced Pharmacy Practices (APPEs) will continue with modifications to the learning activities for students
Caldwell said the faculty wanted to better integrate the didactic classroom instruction that students receive with their real-world experiential education to help streamline the learning process.
“Our current curriculum is great, but the didactic and experiential are more separated from each other than what we’ve envisioned, so we’re building in things like labs and practice transformation projects,” Caldwell said. “It’s like a bridge. We’re helping our students go from sitting in the classroom, holding the knowledge in their brains, to using it — either in a simulated setting like in a lab, or in a real setting, like out in practice.”
Dedicated lab time is an essential component in the new curriculum. Students will have one credit hour in the lab each semester, up until their fourth year. This allows them to repeatedly practice their lab skills and apply these practices to their individual classes each semester.
“I think this curriculum is a lot more about what is really relevant and giving students an opportunity to apply that information, practice skills that they’re going to use in practice, and get feedback on it,” Johnson said. “It’s going to set them up for success in terms of the kind of baseline patient care that pharmacists provide throughout the state and the country.”
Pharmacy practice transformation and implementation science are two novel components guiding the new curriculum. Pharmacy practice transformation is a continuous process that involves updating and aligning the profession with modern practices. Implementation science focuses on methods to facilitate the uptake of evidence-based practice. The concepts work together: as pharmacy practice continues to evolve to best meet needs and implementation science helps make those changes faster and make them stick.
“We are pretty uniquely positioned among pharmacy schools to have a practice transformation focus in this program because of what’s happening in pharmacy in Arkansas, as well as the Center for Implementation Research that resides within the college,” Caldwell said. “It gives us a unique skillset to pull from and help develop our students in this way.”
“We want to graduate pharmacists who are ready to be change agents and who have some base-level experience when they go out into the field knowing how to take an idea from point A, to B, to C, to D,” Stafford said. “There’s certainly a push for practice transformation in curricula across the country, but I don’t know of another university that has something quite like this.”
Significant revisions to the curriculum had been in the works for some time, but the arrival of Dean Cindy Stowe, Pharm.D., in 2019 helped speed things up, Caldwell said.
“Cindy brought the vision to our school to rethink our curriculum and basically drop a bomb on it,” Caldwell said. “It honestly has been going on for years, but it became more real when she got here. We also had to get through a new accreditation cycle and COVID. After our reaccreditation in 2021, we began a more focused and concerted effort.”
The revisions were “a full faculty effort” for the college, with approximately 50 people spread out across multiple working groups, Caldwell said. He also credited external stakeholders like the Arkansas Pharmacists Association, the Arkansas State Board of Pharmacy and preceptors throughout the state that instruct students on their IPPEs and APPEs and give the college feedback on student preparation.
Efforts will be constant until full implementation in 2029, and that includes making refinements to existing courses before they’re finally phased out.
“We have been looking so very closely at the new curriculum that we’ve been able to notice things within the current curriculum that we can modify or improve to help ease the transition, and we’re putting those in place as well,” Stafford said. “That’s been a nice benefit.”