Alecia James took a roundabout path to the pharmacy field but once she chose to enter the profession, she set a direct course for Mercer University in Atlanta.
“Mercer was my first choice,” said James, a Hampton, Va., native who graduated from Virginia Tech in 2003 and worked as a social worker for seven years. “Their program had a great reputation and I knew I’d get the right preparation for anywhere I want to go in my career.”
James originally planned to work in community pharmacy.
“I love that people can walk in and ask questions of a pharmacist, that they don’t need an appointment or insurance to talk to someone about their health,” she said. “But now I’m also interested in clinical pharmacy. Mercer gives us lots of opportunities to test out different roles and settings.”
Mercer University has the third-ranked pharmacy program among private universities in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report. Founded in 1903 as the independent Southern College of Pharmacy, the school merged with Mercer University in 1959 to become the largest pharmacy school in Georgia. The school has almost 650 students.
The program continues to evolve to meet the changing needs of health care and the growing demands on pharmacists. This year, the school opened a new Center for Drug Design, an addition to its growing body of faculty and graduate research. It will be led by J. Phillip Bowen, Ph.D., one of the nation’s leading scholars in computer-assisted drug design.
The school also upped its admission requirements from 60 to 90 hours of pre-pharmacy requirements.
“Since most of our students had more than three years of undergraduate work and more than half had undergraduate degrees, it wasn’t a great leap for us,” said H.W. “Ted” Matthews, Ph.D., R.Ph., dean of Mercer’s College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. “The new standards allowed us to refocus our curriculum in the Pharm.D. program and offer students more patient problem-solving, critical-thinking skills. Every one of our courses has more patient focus. Even science courses have more case studies.”
Focusing on patients
The role of pharmacists has been moving steadily from product-centered to patient-centered care. Pharmacists are moving from behind the counter to take a more active role in patient care.
Some of the factors driving that shift are the push to less-costly outpatient care, complex medicines that require more supervision, longer lifespans of patients, a rise in nursing care facilities and new fields like pharmacogenomics, the influence of genetic variation on drug response.
The school’s new curriculum will offer more interprofessional training to support health care’s multiprovider, collaborative direction.
“Pharmacists have to know how to communicate with other practitioners, as well as with patients,” said Christine Klein, Pharm.D., FASCP, clinical assistant professor and director of introductory experiential education at the school.
First-year students are getting off to a good start in Mercer’s new simulation laboratory, where they spend 56 hours learning patient-assessment, clinical and counseling skills.
“We were hearing from preceptors that students needed to be better-prepared,” Klein said. “Because of the economy, students have fewer opportunities to work in a pharmacy during the summer [break]. This gives them a solid foundation.”
First-year pharmacy student Chase Moody believes the simulation lab has prepared him for clinical rotations and internships.
“I started doing things that I’d be doing as a pharmacist right away, and doing is a good way to learn. We looked up drugs and counseled patients through role play,” Moody said.
Students also learn how to assess sprains, provide asthma education and check a patient’s blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol levels.
Klein believes that giving students all the experiences and opportunities she can will help them compete in a tighter job market.
New kid on the block
Mark Okamoto is dean of the pharmacy school at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine's (PCOM) Georgia campus. The 113-year-old institution opened a second school in Suwanee in 2005 with the mission to train much-needed general practice physicians.
“When we started talking about a pharmacy school here, pharmacists were the second most-needed health professional, after nursing,” said Okamoto, Pharm.D.
In the 1990s, drugstores had sprouted up on every corner and hospitals were growing. Studies supported additional pharmacy education in Georgia, and PCOM leaders carved out a wedge of clinical sites in northeast Georgia, between the reach of long-standing programs at the University of Georgia and at Mercer.
“By the time we opened in 2010, the economy had changed drastically. We were lucky to get in when we did and to have a solid [financial] infrastructure behind us,” Okamoto said.
PCOM accepted 79 students in its charter class, which is scheduled to graduate in 2014. The school enrolled 93 students in its second class and expects to accept 105 to 110 this fall. The school received 1,500 applications for its 93 slots last year and drew students from Georgia, Florida, Texas, California and other states.
“Our curriculum is based on a patient-centered model, but we aim to get students up to speed for practice settings quicker,” Okamoto said. “We were fortunate to be able to build our facilities to the needs of pharmacy education today.”
High-tech learning
PCOM utilizes state-of-the-art technology, with students downloading much of the course material onto their laptops.
“Lectures are captured electronically and put online. That’s especially helpful, because pharmacy students have a greater volume of material to learn today,” Okamoto said.
Classrooms have small breakout rooms, where students gather after lectures to work on projects and participate in discussions. Students have the benefit of hands-on learning envirionments, including a pharmaceutics lab where they learn to compound formulas; a sterile products lab where they make intravenous solutions using aseptic techniques; and a pharmacy practice lab where they learn how pharmacists work in outpatient and inpatient settings.
The simulation lab has three patient mannequins. Professors program them with diseases and students practice choosing and administering appropriate medications.
“We can put our students in dangerous situations without endangering patients,” Okamoto said.
With a medical school on campus, pharmacy students study anatomy using cadavers.
“We use any opportunity to pair pharmacy students with medical students for interprofessional training so that they have a better understanding of what each other knows,” Okamoto said.
PCOM students also take a required course in pharmacoeconomics to learn how to evaluate one drug therapy over another based on effectiveness and cost.
Okamoto hopes that most of PCOM’s students will stay in the Southeast to practice once they graduate. For now, most jobs are found outside major cities.
“In small towns and rural communities, pharmacists can be that triage person, directing people to seek medical care or helping them manage their health with over-the-counter treatments,” he said. “There are more jobs in outlying areas, and those practices are very rewarding.”
In the long term, Mercer and PCOM educators believe pharmacists will be in demand in even more roles and settings. With that in mind, they’re preparing students for the future.
“Even now, I get very excited about the opportunities and avenues our students will have,” Klein said.
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