Faculty preceptors' strategies for teaching clinical reasoning skills in the advanced pharmacy practice experience setting.

Introduction: Clinical reasoning is essential to providing quality patient care. However, advanced pharmacy practice experience (APPE) students may struggle with the real-life aspects of patient care, and it may be difficult to quickly identify these students in order to make meaningful interventions. The purpose of this study was to explore pharmacy faculty preceptors' strategies for identifying gaps and teaching clinical reasoning in the APPE setting.

Methods: A qualitative study utilizing 30-min, one-on-one phone interviews was conducted with faculty members from two schools of pharmacy. Faculty participants were invited based on their APPE preceptor role and expertise in adult general medicine. Interview questions collected faculty demographics and reflections on evaluation and instruction of clinical reasoning skills. Demographics were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Thematic analysis was completed to identify themes from qualitative interview data.

Results: Fifteen faculty preceptors participated. The cohort had an average of 17.1 pharmacy practice years and an average of 11.9 faculty member years. Interviews yielded a 7735-word document for data analysis, which resulted in 11 themes.

Conclusions: This study explored pharmacy faculty preceptors' strategies for identifying gaps in clinical reasoning and their instructional methods to improve those skills, which resulted in 11 themes. Future directions include implementation of a standardized clinical reasoning assessment tool in the APPE setting and exploration of targeted educational interventions.