Introduction
Education in healthcare has increasingly embraced learning opportunities
outside of the classroom and collaboration between professions. Medical,
pharmacy, physical therapy, and nursing programs all require some
component of experiential education or clinical
rotations.1-3 Regardless of the health profession
discipline, all of these programs depend on healthcare sites and
clinical practitioners to provide experiential training to their
learners. As healthcare in the 21st century requires interprofessional
collaboration, many allied health programs offer rotations where
medical, pharmacy, nursing and other healthcare students will
potentially have the opportunity to learn with and from one another.
Utilization of practice sites that embrace a model of team-based care
could be beneficial to students’ learning experience and the sites’
ability to precept a variety of health profession
students.4
Though experiential education is a requirement of many health
professions programs, a multitude of barriers to precepting students
exists. As discussed by Logan et al., some perceived barriers include
loss of patient interaction time, lack of time in the workday, lack of
compensation, and lack of precepting experience.5 The
authors describe the implementation of workshops that provide ways to
foster student-preceptor relationships, effectively teach and provide
feedback, and increase time management skills.5
Over the past few decades, pharmacy curricula have made significant
changes to incorporate earlier and more frequent experiential education.
To ensure diversity of education, the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy
Education (ACPE) requires students to complete Advanced Pharmacy
Practice Experiences (APPE) in community, ambulatory care, hospital, and
inpatient general medicine settings, with elective rotations to further
their interests and grow professionally.3 This
presents challenges as students complete experiences at different
experiential sites, typically requiring orientation and electronic
medical record training at each site.
Many large, state-funded schools have access to a university-associated
health-systems that can serve as experiential education sites for
students. This allows for continuity of training and streamlining the
rotation scheduling process.6 For non-affiliated
programs, partnerships are formed with health-systems without university
ties to precept their students. Schools of pharmacy are required to
conduct quality assurance assessments at these and all experiential
rotation sites.3
Concentrated learning experiences, or block scheduling, enable students
to strengthen clinical and professional skills in an individual
healthcare setting while decreasing orientation and onboarding
time.6-9 Ultimately, the goal is to best prepare
students for postgraduate training and advanced pharmacy practice roles.
At this time, there is a paucity of literature comparing perceptions of
a single school’s APPE partnerships at multiple healthcare sites. We
sought to compare student experiences at two independent university
affiliated programs.