Education of pharmacists for on understanding and providing evidence in clinical practice

Abstract

Pharmacists play several important roles in providing appropriate pharmacotherapy for patients. It is important to learn the processes of finding problems in patients’ pharmacotherapy and resolving them in accordance with scientific evidence. As we recognize that experience of clinical research greatly improves the skills of a clinical pharmacist, we encourage pharmacists in our clinical pharmacy service to perform clinical research. Through discussions with various research collaborators, including pharmacists and other healthcare professionals, the pharmacists participate in designing research, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting results, preparing presentations, and writing papers. In addition, we organize journal clubs and seminars to allow the pharmacists to improve practical skills for working in clinical research. To better educate pharmacists on clinical research, we established a collaborative research group consisting of managers of the Department of Pharmacy who have a Ph.D. degree, and faculty members of the university, which has a collaborative agreement with our hospital. We have weekly collaborative research meetings and discuss facilitating the clinical research conducted by pharmacists. We have implemented an original report form on the progress of clinical research. This is useful because pharmacists can learn through revising the significance and direction of clinical research by writing and correcting these reports.