A person getting intravenous chemotherapy treatments at home might have regular visits from a pharmacist to check on any problems with the drugs. And, increasingly, pharmacists will act as educators, teaching patients how to manage diabetes, high blood pressure, and other chronic conditions. Curriculum changes under way at the U-M are designed to provide pharmacy students with just such skills. From their first year in the doctor of pharmacy program, students learn to communicate with patients and to understand their responsibilities to the people they serve. They're exposed to the Internet right away and taught to evaluate the information they find online.
Students also learn how to critically read and comprehend research papers.
And in courses taught by interdisciplinary faculty teams, they explore how basic science meshes with clinical applications. To answer the question, they had to understand basic principles of drug stability and activity and consider how those might be affected by the method of delivery. We spend a lot of time orienting our students to that notion, telling them that we're at a point in time, not at the end of a time. We want them to be change agents, to continue to redefine pharmacists' roles.