Interprofessional education: definitions, student competencies, and guidelines for implementation.

Interprofessional education (IPE) is an important step in advancing health professional education for many years and has been endorsed by the Institute of Medicine as a mechanism to improve the overall quality of health care. IPE has also become an area of focus for the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP), with several groups, including these authors from the AACP Interprofessional Education Task Force, working on developing resources to promote and support IPE planning and development. This review provides background on the definition of IPE, evidence to support IPE, the need for IPE, student competencies and objectives for IPE, barriers to implementation of IPE, and elements critical for successfully implementing IPE.

A high-stakes assessment approach to applied pharmacokinetics instruction.

Objectives: To identify instructional and assessment problems leading to pharmacy students' failure to retain pharmacokinetics abilities into the experiential year and develop an instructional methodology and abilities-based assessment tool to address the problem.

Methods: Pharmacokinetic instructional methods were assessed and an abilities-based assessment tool was developed and utilized as a requirement for curricular progression. Both the instructional methodology and the assessment tool were evaluated using abilities-based outcomes and faculty surveys.

Medication therapy management: its relationship to patient counseling, disease management, and pharmaceutical care.

Objective: To delineate the relationship, including similarities and differences, between medication therapy management (MTM) and contemporary pharmacist-provided services, including patient counseling, disease management, and pharmaceutical care, to facilitate the continued evolution of commonly used language and a standard of practice across geographic areas and practice environments.

Summary: Incorporation of MTM services into the array of Medicare-funded services affords an opportunity for pharmacists to develop direct patient care services in the community. Defining the role of MTM within the scope of pharmacist-provided patient care activities, including patient counseling, disease management, and all currently provided pharmacy services is essential to the delineation of a viable and sustainable practice model for pharmacists.

Development of an office of teaching, learning and assessment in a pharmacy school.

This article describes the background, development, and assessment of an Office of Teaching, Learning and Assessment at the Harrison School of Pharmacy, Auburn University. This case study is intended to provide other colleges and schools with insights that may facilitate the relatively unproblematic development of similar programs.

Powder densification. 1. Particle-particle basis for incorporation of viscoelastic material properties.

The present investigation was undertaken to examine the basic unit of densification: the particle-particle indentation. The true interparticle contact area that is established during densification ultimately determines the quality of the tablet compact. By examining the interfacial contact between mutually indenting viscoelastic particles, the process of contact evolution may be represented in mathematical form through extension of the classical Hertzian elastic contact description to encompass material viscoelastic terms.