Introduction: Global population ageing is a defining challenge of our time; the global population aged 65 years and over is projected to increase by 120% between 2019-2050. This necessitates a healthcare workforce equipped with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to care for older people with complex needs. The World Health Organization advocate for high-quality undergraduate health professions education in geriatric medicine as a means of anticipating these pressures. Yet, it remains that geriatric medicine is frequently under-represented in health professions education, the reasons for which are multi-faceted, but include lack of specialty- and profession-specific guidelines.
Methods: Therefore, our aim was to understand the global landscape of geriatric medicine education in pharmacy, with a view to developing a recommended undergraduate curriculum to guide and encourage evidence-based educational practice. We propose to undertake this curriculum development in three stages, using established methods previously employed in national medical curricular development:
1. We will establish current practice in undergraduate pharmacy education in geriatric medicine by undertaking a systematic review of the published literature, and a survey of UK pharmacy schools on the content, methods, and duration of teaching on ageing and related topics.
2. We will undertake several curriculum mapping exercises: firstly, of the General Pharmaceutical Council standards for the initial education and training of pharmacists to existing undergraduate geriatric medicine curricula, to identify Learning Outcomes (LOs) that are applicable to pharmacy. These LOs will then be mapped to the results of our national teaching survey, in a gap analysis identifying which areas are most and least commonly taught.
3. These curriculum maps will be used to develop a blueprint for a new pharmacy-specific undergraduate curriculum in geriatrics. This blueprint will be shared with key stakeholders, including members of the public, in a consensus panel to reach agreement on LOs for inclusion in the final curriculum.

Introduction: Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) are structured, observable units of daily work used internationally to assess the ability of a learner to complete a variety of workplace tasks . The Australian Medical Council is introducing EPA assessments for first and second-year graduate doctors. Recognising pharmacists' role as medication experts, pharmacists were proposed as one of the health professions appropriate to assess medical interns prescribing EPAs. While EPAs are popular and have been studied extensively, this is the first reported instance of interprofessional EPA assessment in health professional education. This pilot study investigates the time impact on pharmacists' workloads of conducting these EPA assessments.
Methods: Six units (across medicine, emergency, surgery and mental health) within a multisite hospital network participated in a pilot study where pharmacists assessed medical interns’ undertaking prescribing EPAs. Medical interns could approach either pharmacists or medical staff to assess prescribing EPAs. Assessors completed Microsoft Forms at the time of the EPA, including rating level of entrustability, providing qualitative feedback, assigning case complexity based on clinical judgement and recording time taken for EPA assessment and feedback. Data collection was conducted between May to October 2024. Descriptive statistics were performed using Microsoft Excel.
Results: Ten pharmacist assessors completed 28 assessments over 6-months; a median of 1.5 (range 1-6) assessments per pharmacist . The median time taken for each assessment was 10 minutes (range 3-21 minutes). Five EPAs were reported as high-complexity cases. Low-complexity cases took a median of 15 minutes (range 7-21 minutes), medium-complexity 10 minutes (range 3-20) and high-complexity 15 minutes (range 10-20).
Conclusion: Pharmacists typically required less than 15 minutes per EPA assessment and completed a median of 1.5 assessments in 6-months, indicating a feasible workload. Future studies should evaluate the impact of the complete roll out to determine scalability and sustainability for the pharmacy workforce.

Introduction: Pharmacotherapy education faces challenges from rapidly evolving therapeutic knowledge and the need to bridge pharmacology concepts with clinical applications.. While core concepts—fundamental, enduring, and discipline-specific ideas—enhance learning across many disciplines, pharmacotherapy lacks systematically identified core concepts. This study aimed to generate candidate core concepts for pharmacotherapy education in Australia.
Methods: A qualitative multimethod approach was employed through: 1) Document analysis (text mining) of pharmacotherapy textbooks using Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit and Generative Artificial Intelligence interpretation; 2) Virtual brainstorming sessions with 10 pharmacotherapy educators from seven Australian pharmacy schools; and 3) Expert consultation for output refinement. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis supported by NVivo.
Results: Initial text mining (Step 1) yielded 30 terms, while expert brainstorming ( Step 2) generated 52 additional terms. After consolidation and removal of duplicates, 49 unique terms emerged as potential core concepts, organized into four themes:
1. Evidence-based pharmacotherapy (9 concepts) including patient factors, preferences and values.
2. Quality use of medicines in pharmacotherapy (17 concepts) including principles of stewardship
3. Sciences underpinning pharmacotherapy (10 concepts) on comprehensive knowledge for application of pharmacological and pathophysiological key concepts
4. Skills/activities that enable pharmacotherapy(13 concepts) including clinical reasoning and therapeutic decision-making
Expert refinement (Step 3) of these potential core concepts is ongoing.
Conclusion: This preliminary study is part of a biphasic mixed-method research project aiming to identify and generate consensus on core concepts in pharmacotherapy education through an international panel of pharmacy educators. Identification of core concepts is largely an iterative and expert-driven process. The identified concepts will provide pharmacy educators with pedagogical tools to assess conceptual attainment, improve teaching practices, and support curriculum design.

Introduction: Basic training of pharmacists includes knowledge and application, of fundamental scientific concepts to enable effective and competent clinical pharmacy practice. This often focuses on building fundamental scientific knowledge at the start of a pharmacy degree, which comes at the expense of student satisfaction; many students feel that there is too much emphasis on science and not enough on practice. One way to alleviate this problem is through integrated curricula that combine science with practice. At our institution, a new Bachelor of Pharmacy curricula was developed incorporating science and practice integration throughout the degree program. We therefore developed a new educational activity that integrates a pharmaceutical chemistry laboratory (team-based learning) with pharmacist role-playing (simulation) that involves patient counselling, supply, and product recall elements.
Methods: Students prepared three paracetamol suspension formulations then measured and drew conclusions on the stability of each formulation when select ingredients were missing. Each student then undertook a role-play where they were required to counsel a parent requesting paracetamol for their child, supply the medicine, and then undertake a recall of the product and explain why it was recalled. Students’ knowledge was tested through four multiple choice questions in their end of semester exam.
Results: Collectively, the students’ results demonstrated that removing viscosity-enhancing ingredients from the formulations caused the particles to settle faster. For the role-play exercise, just over half of students made at least one mistake with some supplying the wrong medicine or recommending the wrong dose. The exam results showed students understood the role and impact of key ingredients in a suspension formulation and could make general over-the-counter supply recommendations based on the scenario of the role play.
Conclusion: This integrated lab-based counselling practice effectively integrates pharmaceutical chemistry with practice, allowing students to apply scientific knowledge in the context of supplying an over-the-counter medicine.