午夜剧场

Pharmaceutical education transitioned to a six-year system in April 2006, and this year marks its 14th year. During this time, the students graduating this spring will be the ninth generation to become pharmacists under the six-year education system.

Our center has been involved in the smooth operation of practical training in clinical settings conducted between pharmacy students and supervising pharmacists, while performing various scientific validations to pursue more fulfilling training methods.

Recently, not only in pharmaceutical education, there has been a strong demand for a shift from traditional educator-centered process-based education to learner-centered outcome-based education. The educational system is changing to focus on learner outcomes—not "what was taught," but "what the learner has become able to do." Therefore, our research group is working on research from the perspective of educational methods and items to determine how students can gain successful experiences during practical training, increase their "self-efficacy," and achieve higher outcomes.

In the fields of medical sciences and pharmacy, there is an enormous amount to memorize, and it is said that the minimum number of drugs to memorize to pass the National Pharmacist Examination is 500 to 600. Naturally, one must be able to explain not only the names and medicinal effects but also the chemical structures, physical properties, mechanisms of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion, as well as the mechanisms of action. Furthermore, by utilizing this vast knowledge and experience, pharmacists audit the appropriateness of doctors' prescriptions one by one and make prescription proposals as necessary. In recent years, pharmacists themselves have also been participating in effective and safe drug therapy for patients by checking the patient's condition from the standpoint of a drug expert and sharing information with other medical staff.

In this way, amid the rapid advancement of medical knowledge and medical technology, more than 10 years have already passed since the start of the six-year pharmaceutical education system. I believe the time has come for pharmacists, who are usually quiet, to demonstrate their true capabilities.

A keyword that is becoming increasingly important in education at medical faculties is "medical professionalism." However, within pharmaceutical education, a consensus has not yet been reached on what constitutes medical professionalism for pharmacists. Therefore, we have hypothesized that having high problem-solving abilities—that is, being a "pharmacist with research capabilities"—is an important aspect of pharmacist professionalism, and we are challenging ourselves to develop and verify evaluation methods and tools for this.