Katoue, Maram Gamal (2021) Adapting pharmacy education to the needs of society : a research journey to prepare collaborative, practice-ready pharmacists. (PhD thesis), Kingston University, .
Abstract
Pharmaceutical care (PC) is a practice philosophy that embraces all the activities that pharmacists perform to optimise patients’ medications use. The author explored PC practice in Kuwait and investigated areas of developments in pharmacy education to support its provision. The thirteen publications presented in this thesis are organised into three themes. The first theme focussed on PC practice whereby the attitudes of pharmacy students and hospital pharmacists towards PC and views on the barriers to its implementation were explored using survey-based studies. The findings indicated that attitudes towards PC were positive but PC practice was limited and challenged by several professional, organisational and technical barriers including lack of teamwork among healthcare professionals. The role of pharmacists in parenteral nutrition therapy was investigated using qualitative interviews to explore the extent of PC practice implementation at hospitals. This further revealed lack of collaborative practice and the limited clinical role of pharmacists in this specialised area. The resulting publications highlighted the needed educational and organisational reforms to support PC practice in Kuwait. Therefore, the second and third themes explored instructional techniques and educational models that are applied in other countries to prepare pharmacy students for PC practice and the feasibility of their implementation in Kuwait. The thesis describes the author’s published descriptive studies and literature reviews on the use of active learning methods and competency-based pharmacy education to equip pharmacy students with the necessary professional competencies. It further describes simulation-based education and interprofessional education (IPE) for integrating collaborative practice to support PC provision. Survey-based research was used to assess the attitudes of health faculty members and students in Kuwait University towards IPE. In general, there were positive attitudes towards these educational innovations and recommendations were provided for their future implementation including the need for administrative support and good investment in training of faculty members. The publications included in this thesis were the first to address the topics in question in Kuwait and the author became recognised as an expert in these fields. Pharmacy education in Kuwait has been evolving by adopting the Doctor of Pharmacy programme and developing IPE curriculum. The thesis provides recommendations for imbedding educational strategies in the pharmacy curriculum to prepare pharmacy graduates to become collaborative, practice-ready PC practitioners capable of providing the PC services that the society needs and deserves.
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