Abstract
Pharmaceutical education has come to a major turning point when major changes are taking place, and training in hospitals is now obligatory for pharmacy students. It is therefore important for hospitals to offer a high quality of training.
For this purpose, guidelines for pharmacist training in hospitals and a qualification system for hospitals offering such training have been proposed. Additional provisions for pharmaceutical education have been established under the title “Models for Pharmaceutical Education, Core Curriculum for Practical Training and Curriculum for Final Year Training”.
However, except for those affiliated with medical schools, education is not a primary concern for hospitals, making it difficult to follow the above guidelines for many hospitals, of which ours is one.
Every year, we receive several students who wish to do their training close to home but they cannot receive instruction in some of the subjects in the guidelines because we do not offer the related services, causing us great concern.
To fill the gap, however, we have developed a system called “Support System for Pharmaceutical Training in Hospitals using the Internet” and it is now in operation. Since the amount of information on the Internet that can be used for training purposes is very limited, our system is still far from satisfactory but students have been finding it useful.
A major limitation we face is the lack of teaching materials available for our system. Solving this problem is very important for hospitals such as ours that do not offer some of the services in the guidelines, as well as for improving the quality of pharmaceutical education. This problem will never be completely solved, however, unless individual hospitals start to offer the services that they now lack. It is thus necessary for the teaching hospitals and the Hospital Training Council to develop a system for augmenting the amount of teaching materials available.
With the rapid spread of the Internet, many educational programs using it have been developed to fill gaps between the levels of education provided by different institutions, and they are highly regarded. Thus, in order to improve the quality of training programs in hospitals having similar problems to ours, it is necessary for general hospitals, universities, and teaching hospitals to collaborate on producing more teaching materials for pharmaceutical training.
