From 29th to 30th November 2021, online
Education is the basis for the development of all future health professionals, including pharmacists. During education at higher education institutions that offer pharmacy studies, it is important to provide certain competencies to students, and also, not less important, these institutions are required to maintain quality control of the final “product” – future pharmacist. Professional internship within the pharmacy study programs is currently being accompanied at four public universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina that provide pharmacy programs. However, the system of organization and duration of professional internship, methods of evaluation and verification of accomplishment is left to each individual institution to choose. Competency framework for pharmacists currently doesn’t exist in Bosnia and Herzegovina and therefore it is difficult to equalize the verification of learning outcomes during professional internship. Therefore, the adoption of a competency framework would help pharmacy study providers in Bosnia and Herzegovina as it would allow them to identify all the skills and knowledge that pharmacy students need to acquire during their professional internship, and to develop methods to test it.
For the purposes of this report, the current organization of professional internship for pharmacy students at 4 public universities in BIH and partner universities in Europe was compared and it was found that there are significant differences between them. Also, in order to determine the relevant competencies for future pharmacists, a questionnaire survey based on the FIP competency framework (version 2) was conducted among pharmacists in practice in BIH and Croatia. It was found that pharmacists in BIH and Croatia differ in their responses in only 3 competencies of 124 tested within the area of Pharmaceutical health promotion and Pharmaceutical care.
Additionally, during the symposium in Sarajevo, a workshop World café was held by representatives from academia (UNSA, UNTL, UBL, SUM) and representative pharmacists from work forces – community pharmacy, industry, marketing and management and legislation. Pharmacists from practice had the opportunity to state what competencies they need in their daily work in practice, but did not acquire them during their studies, and an overview of their answers is presented in this report.
Finally, as the last part of this report, a questionnaire survey on the use of teaching methods in teaching was conducted among teaching staff at 7 partner universities. The most significant differences in terms of used teaching methods were detected in the field of interactive and written seminars, with emphasis on more frequent use of these methods at public universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina compared to partner universities in EU. However, it has been noted that 45.08% of teaching staff who completed the survey declared that they have never had any kind of education about the use of teaching skills and methods or had them 10 or more years ago. Therefore, it would be advisable to introduce compulsory education in the field of teaching methods for all teaching staff in a certain period.