Pharmacy program steps up to meet demand

DENVER – Accountability is about more than individual grades at the new Regis University School of Pharmacy.

Expected to have done the required reading before they set foot in the classroom on a given day, students take a quiz on the material. Their scores are recorded electronically.

Then they take the same quiz again as a team of five or six students, discussing the material and the questions as they go. The team’s answers may differ greatly from what the students answered on their own.

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Both the individual and team scores count, giving students motivation to do well for themselves and for their team.

“In the end, you learn that the team does better than you do by yourself,´ said Jisha John, a 21-year-old student in the Denver-based program that opened its doors to students at the end of August. “I think we all believe that it’s easier and better to trust ourselves than it is to trust someone else. But being in this program has been a real eye-opening experience.”

The power of teamwork is just one of the hallmarks of the pharmacy school, one of only two in Colorado. The other is at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

More than 700 students applied for the 53 spots available this fall at Regis. For the class that enters in the fall of 2010, Regis will cap its enrollment at 75. As word about the program gets around, school leaders say they expect even more students to apply.

Regis already has programs in nursing and physical therapy and officials decided to add a pharmacy school because it fit in well with the Jesuit university’s mission to serve the underserved.

Growing field

Pharmacy careers are popular because of the demand, the projected growth in the industry due to the aging population, and the salary. A pharmacist’s average annual salary is about $112,000, according to Drug Topics, a news magazine for pharmacists. Average salaries in the field are going up despite the economy, and about 75 percent of newly hired pharmacists receive signing bonuses, according to the magazine.

Colorado has a great need for pharmacists in rural areas and among underserved populations, said Lane Brunner, dean of the Regis School of Pharmacy.

With the possibility of health-care reform, Brunner said pharmacists may play an even more integral role in people’s lives.

“Health-care reform would be beneficial to pharmacists,” he said. “More and more pharmacists are doing immunizations now. And in some states, pharmacists have the authority to prescribe medication.”

Many people, though, don’t really understand what pharmacists do, Brunner said. Most have more interaction with pharmacy technicians who work alongside a pharmacist at retail pharmacies.

“Most people think the pharmacist is the person who takes the pills from the big bottle and puts them in the little bottle,” Brunner said. “There are two kinds of patients: those who come to the pharmacy once in a while, and those who come up the counter and can say, ‘That’s my pharmacist over there.’ “

A pharmacist’s job is to work with physicians, nurse practitioners, physical therapists and others to manage a patient’s medication. Because people get prescriptions for different medications from different doctors who don’t necessarily talk to each other, the pharmacist is the one who recognizes when medications won’t jibe well. They can also explain to people why they need certain medications, when and how to take them.

But because most people are in a hurry as they run in and out of a pharmacy, they may not know they can have a relationship with a pharmacist like they have a relationship with their doctor or hairstylist.

“The goal we have with our graduates is that they have this kind of relationship with patients,” Brunner said.

Learning in teams

Before they can build relationships with patients, Regis pharmacy students have to learn how to build relationships with each other.

When Brunner and the faculty and staff were planning the new pharmacy program, they chose some non-traditional approaches.

For one, they decided not to accept students solely based on their test scores and grade-point averages. A large part of getting accepted to the Regis School of Pharmacy is how students do in eight interviews that last about eight minutes each.

Faculty also threw out the idea of lecture-based classes. They sat down and analyzed first what they lacked as students themselves, then what was missing from their own teaching experiences. They also asked pharmacists what people entering the field need but don’t have.

Communication skills, the ability to think critically and a process of active learning were the answers to all of the above. So the faculty adopted what’s called Team-Based Learning, or TBL, which was developed in business schools about 20 years ago, Brunner said. The only other pharmacy school in the country using the concept is at California State University-Northridge, he added.

“This approach is pretty foreign to most of us,´ said 28-year-old Matthew White, who spent six years in the Navy and was a semester or two away from graduating from Metro State College of Denver when he got accepted to Regis’ pharmacy school. “It’s a lot more involved. There is a sense of accountability because you don’t want to let your team down.”

Students work in the same teams for all of their classes. The professor may give a 10- to 15-minute mini-lecture, but students learn primarily from advance preparation for classes, talking with each other about the material and doing assigned activities together.

“The mini-lecture gives the students some security, especially the audio learners,´ said Steve Luckey, assistant professor in the program. “But the vast majority of the learning happens in the teams. I love it because in all of the teaching I’ve done, I was moving toward this concept of active learning.”

The four-year pharmacy program has two basic components: basic science knowledge in areas like biochemistry, chemistry, physiology and immunology; and clinical application. The emphasis and complexity of the clinical application increases as students go through the program, culminating with two practicum experiences where students work alongside pharmacists.

As new as the program is, students say they are getting used to working in teams. And they like being part of an innovative approach in a brand-new program.

Jisha John of Chicago applied to six pharmacy schools and said she was glad to be accepted to Regis.

“I wanted to be part of a smaller school, and I wanted to be part of the pioneer education they’re doing here,” she said.