The Three-Year Pharmacy Education Model- A Critical Review

[28657]

Remember the purpose of this thread is to compare programs.

Subjectively, or objectively?

Kind of sounds like a "My school is harder than yours" response to me...but eh, why should I care b/c when I graduate from my 3 year school (in 2006) I'll make as much as you will (in 2007).

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[tupac_don]

Funny... I pay 100,000 dollars to LEARN. Not to be weeded out. I'm sure 100% of my classmates do the same. As soon as we are accepted into pharmacy school and as soon as they start taking our money, it becomes a business transaction and they owe us students something in return. The weeding out is supposed to stop at the application to pharmacy school process. If you can't cut it, you don't get accepted.

Of course it doesn't always happen that way because some people refuse to study when they get accepted, but for those that do study a lot and still fail, the school is just stealing your money which borders on the line of fraud and theft.

Going to pharmacy school is not a transaction, you are confused my friend. You still have to EARN your degree. I am sorry I don't mean to sound non emphathetic here, but if you are studying a lot and still failing you are doing something seriously long. If I haven't done pharmacy school, I might even believe you, but seriously you have to rethink your strategy if you are failing stuff, it shouldn't be happening. If you can't pass the bear minimum, whatever it is say 70%, you can't cut it. It's not like a school requires you to have 90% to pass. And the job of faculty is to put out competent pharmacists out there, if you are struggling now, you will struggle as a pharmacist too. Just because you paid money, school shouldn't just roll over and give you the degree. Life is all about competition. If you know what the cutoff is, and what you need to pass, you should pass it. The sad thing is that a lot of students adopt this attitude where I made it to school so now I can slack and do bare minimum and I will still get my degree. Sorry, but I disagree strongly with you. I mean who do you think professional students are, oh I made it so I don't have to do anything, school owes me a diploma. What do you think happens to athletes who don't perform, or musicians who suck, even if they were at the top before, they washout, see ya later. Why are pharmacists or any professionals for that matter any better? Just my two cents.
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[lord999]

Since I've been at both sort of programs, I find Minnesota harder only because there is a lot more useless junk taught in the curriculum. I tutor Pharmacology and Medicinal Chemistry at UMN, and I swear that the pharmacologist must have been a departmental reject for T&P. He doesn't put any effort into teaching, and it clearly shows. I can say though that most of the clinical faculty for the Pharmacotherapeutics modules are outstanding at UMN like Cardiac, Renal, Neuro, and Acute Care. However, I can't say the same for many of the ones taught at MWU (Renal, Endocrinology, Women's Health, and Respiratory Therapeutics come to mind).

At both schools, you can work a 20-30 hour schedule and maintain Rho Chi status. Both schools make it a point to have the hardest part of the process be the admissions. Except for Pharmacology/Medicinal Chemistry at UMN, there isn't an indirect attitude of attempting to fail students. It just wastes everyone's time.

I don't think the program needs a high level of intelligence (though it helps) to succeed. Everyone that I saw fail at both schools did so because they were lazy at it, not because of any lack of intelligence. A reasonably sustained study effort will pass a student.

 

[tupac_don]

I've done quite a bit of research on the concept of three-year pharmacy schools. What exactly is the benefit of a three-year school? It seems to me that the only benefit for students is to graduate a year early. While that is a noble goal and all, there seems to be a lot of cons involved with a three year school, like....

• Sub-Standard Education: It seems to me that many of the three year schools have adopted an “Integrated Sequence” model for teaching physiology, medicinal chemistry/pharmacology and therapeutics. Almost all three-year schools operate on the quarter system, with the exception of USN and some others. It seems to me that in order to keep up with the schedule, a lot of important material is left out. Thus, students are left with the highlights of important material instead of knowing the intricate details.
  
• Faculty: I’ve went and looked at many of the three-year school websites and noticed that many of the pharmacy practice professors are young and just out of their residency. I am not saying that having young professors is a bad thing, but when you have the majority of your professors coming off of their residency into your classroom, this could be a problem. The one good thing is that they will be quite familiar with concepts they learned in school. However, the bad thing is that these people will not be able to write a good test, and will not accept the fact that they don’t. This is where it is good to have experienced pharmacy practice faculty on staff.
  
• Burnout Factor: It seems to me that this is a major issue among students and faculty members that doesn’t seem to happen as much at traditional schools. The students suffer burnout for the fact there is no breaks except for the week off here and there. Faculty suffers burnout from the fact they must publish in order to keep their job. It’s hard to do that when you have classroom responsibilities all year long as well as maintaining their practice site responsibilities.
  
• Organizational Activity: It seems to me that this is something that is a constant challenge at most 3 year schools due to time constraints. It also doesn't help that the attitude of most students is to put in their three years and get out. That is not a good breeding ground for people that want to get involved.

In light of these cons, what are the educational benefits by going to a three-year school other than the ability to graduate a year earlier?

I am sorry that you had a bad experience with a 3-program, but I assure you that they are not substandard in their education. It's what you put into it. I don't find that I am any less prepared than people that went to 4 year schools. If you put in the hardwork, and you can take the pace, you are solid. They are better, b/c if you can handle the work, I think you are just wasting a year in a 4 year program. Let me ask you another question, are traditional Pharm D's better than now Pharm D's, I tell you what it depends on the student. I think it's better to do this Pharm D and resident if you wanna be a hot shot, than 2 year Pharm D like before. Seriously though it is person specific, you can't apply it to all individuals equally.

My experiences were:

1) You get to start your rotations in like 2 years, which gives you a real moral boost that you will be done soon.

2) You still have plenty of time, I didn't feel burned out at all, yea there was the one summer that you have basic science courses, so 3 semesters in a row, but big deal. The next summer was with rotations, and so it's just like working. We did get a whole summer off.

3) You get to be done a whole year earlier, and so you can do a residency, which you will be much better prepared as a pharmacist if you do a 3 year program and a residency opposed to 4 year program with no residency.

4) You get an extra year to make money.

5) Bottom line, it matters much more where you do your rotations, in what hospital, rather than where you go to school. The hospital rotations is where you are really gonna learn your craft.

I mean seriously for the most part, pharmacists use about 20% of the knowledge they learned. Getting good training in the hospital, and having clinical experience in the field is more imp, than if you had 1 semester of medicinal chem or 2, big deal. You think you are gonna remember the chemical structure of pioglitazone, or proton pump inhibitor. If you need it, you can look it up. Clinical judgement is something you can't learn in school, you have to experience it.

 

[hellofrom]

Here is my prospective on the matter. Just for background I was educated at a 'top five' school, completed a teaching residency (where I learned such things as test writing though I think everyone could use some improvement) at a new 4-year program, and now 'teach' at a three-year school of pharmacy.

First off, I question the bias that you harbor against three-year programs. I would question how you know that a four-year program is the best. It is how it was done in the past however that does not mean it is the best (we use to give three year degrees out all the time called BSPharm and those students seemed to do well.)

As far as the questions posed for three year programs

A: Faculty = issue everywhere. Contrary to popular belief, faculty are poorly paid compared to other pharmacists. Thus, as faculty mature and have families it becomes harder to resist an industry job (>110k) or consultant job. Thus no matter where you go, you will probably have a 'young' faculty. That has it's strengths and weaknesses.

B. Burnout/Retention: These go hand in hand. I can say that in the program I am associated with, after three years we have had zero mental breakdowns or students dropping out of the program because of stress. The reasons for removal are very similar to what they were at my two previous institutions. We only enroll seventy (I have no clue where the new programs admit 150 as you say.) We have had less than %10 of students falling behind.

C. Organizations: I am sorry to hear that the school you are with does not have time for organizations. We have 6 very active groups not including the service and honor groups. We just raised presents for about 80 kids in our area.

I look forward to seeing your data from your research; I hope that you are able to present it in a less biased form than the way you asked your questions.


PS I verified the place where the 3 year program said that it trained community pharmacists in it's mission statement. If you copy the entire statement it adds that they aim to produce a clinical pharmacist to work in community settings since the majority of pharmacist work in this area,

 

[ultracet]

PS I verified the place where the 3 year program said that it trained community pharmacists in it's mission statement. If you copy the entire statement it adds that they aim to produce a clinical pharmacist to work in community settings since the majority of pharmacist work in this area,

and what exactly does that change?

 

[Abilify]

As far as the questions posed for three year programs

A: Faculty = issue everywhere. Contrary to popular belief, faculty are poorly paid compared to other pharmacists. Thus, as faculty mature and have families it becomes harder to resist an industry job (>110k) or consultant job. Thus no matter where you go, you will probably have a 'young' faculty. That has it's strengths and weaknesses.

I would hope that any pharmacist/soon to be pharmacist knows that you don't go into education for money

B. Burnout/Retention: These go hand in hand. I can say that in the program I am associated with, after three years we have had zero mental breakdowns or students dropping out of the program because of stress. The reasons for removal are very similar to what they were at my two previous institutions. We only enroll seventy (I have no clue where the new programs admit 150 as you say.) We have had less than %10 of students falling behind.

Interesting. The program I am associated with after 2 years has had several mental breakdowns and students dropping out of the program because of stress. We also enroll 68-70 here as well, so I have no idea where you get 150 from.

C. Organizations: I am sorry to hear that the school you are with does not have time for organizations. We have 6 very active groups not including the service and honor groups. We just raised presents for about 80 kids in our area.

We have them. We have 4 organizations, soon to be 5. We raised gifts for children in our area too. We really advance the profession when we do that, just like APhA did recently with raising 40 tons of food for local Washington DC residents.

I look forward to seeing your data from your research; I hope that you are able to present it in a less biased form than the way you asked your questions.


PS I verified the place where the 3 year program said that it trained community pharmacists in it's mission statement. If you copy the entire statement it adds that they aim to produce a clinical pharmacist to work in community settings since the majority of pharmacist work in this area,

understand that the only reason I got a response from people is because I created such a slanted question. Otherwise this thread would of been dead long time ago.

 

[sdn1977]

Its funny to see this argument again. I think I first heard it decades ago when I was applying to pharmacy schoools and mine (UCSF) was the only one in CA that was 4 years. Now...after all this time, you will obtain a very useful education in pharmacy no matter where you attend. BUT...it is what you do with it later that makes the difference. When asked to develop the pharmacy portion of a neonatal transport/stabilization program, the expectation of ALL staff is they are capable of taking on this task. No one cares if their degree is BS or Pharm.D. - their careers have identified their experience which ultimately draws upon their didactic education and their continuing education. So choose your school based upon what is right for you....money,location, research opportunities, SO concerns then then decide you'll spend the rest of your life learning about pharmacy. Enjoy!

 

[DrugDealer]

I posted a question earlier, which I thought was relevant and no one responded. I'll ask again.

It seems that 3-year schools get a 4-5 week vacation in between their quarters. It looks like they get anywhere from 12-14 weeks off in a calendar year. This equates to an entire summer off. At a 4-year school, you also get spring & winter breaks which accounts for an extra 4 weeks off. So, 3-year schools only put you in school for 4 weeks longer each year. That would equate to 3 months more total school time in 3 years. How can an entire year of pharmacy school get crammed into 3 months, which is less than one semester of school?

At MCPHS-Worcester, we only have 6 weeks off per year. 3 for the holidays, 1 for spring break, 1 between spring and summer semester, and 1 between summer and fall semester. This should put us in class for 46 weeks, but I can only come up with 45 looking at my calendar--16 in the fall, 16 in spring, 13 in the summer. These 2 extra summer sessions, which would not exist in a 4 year program, account for an extra 26 weeks or 6.5 months that we've crammed in. Combined with an extra class each semester, they can fit everything in this time frame.