Training Program on In-pharmacy Drug Products at Pharmacy School and Its Evaluation

As part of training in community pharmacy practices at our school of pharmacy,we conducted a training program aiming to enhance students’understanding of in-pharmacy drug products,and evaluated the change in their awareness of this subject afterwards,as well as their degree of satisfaction with the training and the degree to which they found it useful.The program consisted of giving students experience of the manufacturing process of particular in-pharmacy products and a case conference on them (Cold remedy No.13 A,topical 0.1% indomethacin solution and Keishi-to).We distributed a questionnaire to 111 students who took the training in 2009,and analyzed the responses of 101 who fully completed the questionnaire.After the training,about 90% of respondents selected“agree”or“strongly agree”as their responses to the statements“Inpharmacy drug products give customers a feeling of affinity with the pharmacy”,“In-pharmacy drug products are useful for gaining the trust of patients”,“In-pharmacy drug products show the characteristics of particular pharmacies”and“Dealing with in-pharmacy drug products is challenging”.Regarding the program content,the response rate for students who felt it was“useful”or“very useful”with regard to the case conference was close to 100%.Following this,the order of usefulness of content was packaging and labeling (99.0%),preparation of package insert (98.0%),manufacturing data record (97.0%),manufacturing (96.0-99.0%) and quality assessment (83.2%).The training on in-pharmacy drug product manufacturing processes included both pharmacological and pharmaceutical aspects and legal issues.Students found it to be beneficial in giving them a sense of the professionalism of the pharmacist as well as a feeling of the value of the pharmacist’s work and the responsibility that goes with it.Training on in-pharmacy drug products therefore has great potential in the education of pharmacy students.