Developing Skills that can Contribute to Pharmacotherapy as a Pharmacist:

from Physical Assessment Skills to Protein Binding Replacement Techniques

Abstract

While working as a hospital pharmacist, I always felt that pharmacists lacked various skills to understand vital signs and images of clinical findings that were often seen during ward conferences. Therefore, I believe that pharmacists should be able to provide technical guidance in understanding vital signs, which is a common language for medical personnels. After becoming a faculty member, in 2006, Professor Norito Takamura and I applied for and were accepted into the training program on promoting the highly-qualified medical personnel to meet the social needs such as community medicine (Medical Personnel GP) supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, Japan. Along with professor from the university, I focused on building training systems for pharmacists to enable them in understanding the vital signs. These training systems aimed to teach basic physical assessment skills that can help pharmacists in contributing to pharmacotherapy and studying the protein binding displacement techniques between serum proteins and drugs. In this paper, we would like to present the current status of the clinical pharmacy simulation training at our university. For instance, we describe our efforts in conducting bedside training for pharmacy students, physical assessment workshop for pharmacists, training sessions on advanced objective structured clinical examination (Advanced OSCE) with patient simulator, and creating e-learning materials, etc.