We introduced an early exposure pharmacy-training program on prescribing for first year students who entered the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences,Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts in 2005,and then evaluated its results.The purpose of the program is to motivate students to increase their knowledge of pharmacy to higher levels in the early part of their university study.It includes exposure to all basic techniques required by pharmacists to dispense prescriptions in hospital and community pharmacies.
We evaluated the effectiveness of the program using the visual analog scale (VAS) method and a questionnaire.In the VAS evaluation,scores for students’self-evaluation of their degree of understanding and proficiency for several subjects were higher after introducing the program than they were before.The results of the questionnaire showed that almost of all of the students had gained much basic knowledge of pharmacy as well as an awareness that pharmacy practice is intimately connected with the life of human beings.Major changes have recently been made to the educational curriculum at faculties of pharmaceutical science at Japanese universities and with our program we were able to show that exposing students to the basic techniques of the pharmacist soon after entering university is a useful way of increasing their desire to learn about pharmacy.We feel that it will become a fundamental part of pharmaceutical education for first year students as it will enable them to be more aware of the functions of the pharmacist in the hospital pharmacies,community pharmacies and other clinical settings.
