Abstract
To develop a residency curriculum dedicated to training qualified pharmacists to coordinate and cooperate with other healthcare professionals in team-care settings, we compared curricula of the long-standing postgraduate year-2 residency program (oncology) of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) with the Japanese residency program for pharmacists specializing in oncology of the National Cancer Center Hospital (NCCH) of Japan. We thereby identified challenges of the residency program for the training of specialist pharmacists, and focused on areas deemed necessary to foster qualified pharmacists to contribute to the team care. The results of the comparison showed that there were no substantive differences in the outcomes and goals of the curricula between Japan and the United States (US). The US curriculum, however, followed a much more consistent policy, and placed a greater emphasis on fostering the ability to optimize individual patient’s pharmacotherapy by making full use of “clinical reasoning”. We also conducted a questionnaire survey of NCCH residents and preceptors to identify specific areas for improvement in the curriculum. The results of the survey revealed the necessity of training with an emphasis on cultivating drug information collection/processing skills to enhance research abilities, particularly among the less-experienced residents in tackling clinical research, and standardizing residents’ and preceptors’ views on outcomes and goals. The challenges learned and the improvement plans generated from this study may have a wide applicability to other institutions or specialty areas in the context of developing specialist pharmacists.
