Introduction: Like the kangaroo, pharmacist prescribing in Australia is moving ahead in leaps and bounds. Governments are addressing health system and workforce challenges by exploring pharmacists working to their full scope of practice. Accredited education programs will assure regulators that pharmacists have demonstrated the required competency to prescribe safely.
Methods: The Pharmacy Board of Australia (Board) engaged the Australian Pharmacy Council (APC) to develop accreditation standards for pharmacist prescriber education programs. APC conducted a robust and collaborative consultation process including multiple rounds of public consultation surveys and forums. Feedback was analysed and a summary, including how the feedback was used, was made available publicly to provide transparency on decision making. Feedback received guided the standards criteria and performance outcomes framework, including entry criteria, work-integrated learning, supervision requirements, assessment methods and program scope.
Results: Feedback was received from a range of stakeholders including consumers, pharmacists, regulators and other health professionals. There was general agreement about entry requirements, content being aligned to the Australian Prescribing Competencies Framework, work-integrated learning requirements and the role of a designated prescriber supervisor. Stakeholder expectations about what a prescribing program would look like was challenging to navigate. Differing views were found across themes, including: qualification level and program length; program scope – prescribing competency versus clinical training; assessment – final comprehensive summative assessment versus programmatic assessment; designated scope of practice; and terminology – protocol, supervised, and autonomous prescribing.
Conclusion: Accredited pharmacist prescriber education programs ensure graduates demonstrate the required prescribing performance outcomes that are applied to their individual scope of practice and clinical context. As pharmacist prescribing in Australia evolves, standards, frameworks and guidelines provide assurance to governments, regulators and the public, that pharmacists are appropriately trained and qualified to contribute to safe, collaborative, and patient-centred care.

Introduction: Pharmacists require experience and expertise with electronic health records (EHR) to provide efficient and effective care to their patients. A 2017 study demonstrated only 63% of schools were using an EHR in their standard educational programming. This results in an experience gap as 99% of US hospitals use an EHR and 96% are using computerized order entry for medications.
Methods: Third year pharmacy students were trained on the EPIC® EHR during a clinical capstone course including 8 hours of EPIC® training paired with 4 course activities and assessments. Training included EPIC® navigation, live/remote patient evaluation to identify pharmacotherapy interventions. We evaluated preparedness to perform on advanced pharmacy practice experience (APPE) rotations that utilize EHRs for patient care.
Results: In academic year 2023- 2024, 73 students responded to the survey. Fifty-five percent agreed or strongly agreed that EPIC training within the course increased their proficiency with the EHR. Sixty-one percent of students thought the clinical capstone training adequately prepared them for their APPE EHR (24% were neutral); 67% of students ‘Somewhat or strongly agreed’ the EPIC experiences in the capstone course improved their ability to perform on their APPE rotation. Seventy-three percent of preceptors ‘somewhat or strongly agreed’ that compared to previous students, their student was more familiar with EPIC functionality. Eighty percent agreed they spent less time teaching the student how to use the EHR compared to previous years and 56% agreed their student’s performance on the rotation was improved based upon their EPIC proficiency/experience prior to starting the APPE. Results from the 2024 – 2025 academic year will be added and presented.
Conclusions: Incorporation of a real world EHR into a controlled classroom environment prior to clinical rotations was feasible and resulted in improved APPE readiness and student performance as perceived by both students and preceptors.

Introduction: Professional identity formation (PIF) represents a critical aspect of a pharmacist’s journey and extends beyond the classroom and clinical environments. The active engagement of students in co-curricular experiences ensures preparation of confident and competent future pharmacy professionals. The objective of this poster is to compare three institution’s methods to engage and track student achievement of co-curriculars, student reflections, and PIF.
Methods: Schools and colleges of pharmacy have considerable challenges to implementing and evaluating co-curricular expectations, with the most frequently identified areas of concern including documentation of impact of experiences on student learning and assessment. The institutions reflected in this project describe how various tools are utilized in the documentation of students’ achievement and development.
Results: University of Maryland School of Pharmacy partnered with the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) to implement ADVANCE as an engagement tool where students evaluate themselves on various skills, design personal goals, and track and document completion of various required and optional tasks. Rutgers University incorporated a non-credit bearing required longitudinal co-curricular workshop sequence entitled, Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Awareness of Self and Professionalism (LEAP) and an annual student professional inventory document in order to cultivate student PIF in alignment with ACPE standards. Through collaborative networking, Northeastern University modified and adopted the LEAP seminar series and integrated APhA ADVANCE as the documentation platform for the co-curricular activities.
Conclusions: Although methods and execution were customized for each institution, student self-reflections provided annual snapshots of PIF and assisted in the relationship between self-confidence, curricular performance, and its relation to APPE-readiness. Development of a structured co-curricular experience and implementation of a solution to longitudinally track student progression and development across the co-curriculum requires consideration for available resources, including time, budget and technology.

Introduction: Pre-work completed before class aims to provide students with foundational knowledge. However, we struggle to get students to complete assigned readings and pre-work and therefore a large portion of class time is spent addressing students’ knowledge gaps. Importantly, without this foundational knowledge, students often arrive in class unprepared to participate in counselling role play activities, which call for higher-order thinking skills. Additionally, we need to professionally socialise first year students into the pharmacy profession by helping them to acquire pharmacists’ ways of thinking and ways of doing. The introduction of a new integrated curriculum provided an opportunity to re-think transition and professional socialisation in tandem.
Methods: We redesigned weekly pharmacy practice workshops in a new first-year integrated unit to scaffold learning and help students gain mastery of threshold concepts within a therapeutic topic in an authentic way. Key features include: targeted assigned readings from key professional resources, the introduction of an invigilated restricted open book quiz at the start of each class, clinical roleplay, peer feedback and tutor debrief, and timely quiz feedback.
Results: The new workshops were implemented from August 2023. Students engaged in five cycles of learning in this new format. Using the therapeutics quiz as a proxy measure for pre-work completion, average marks over the five quizzes was 90% or 7 out of 8 questions correct per quiz, suggesting a high level of student engagement with pre-work readings (since answers come directly from the assigned readings). From the students’ perspective, their quiz performance provided a source of positive reinforcement that motivated them to complete the next set of readings in the subsequent week.
Conclusion: Relatively low-stakes assigned readings and associated assessment tasks illustrated to students the direct alignment between class exercises and assessment. This approach boosted student confidence in task completion while consolidating necessary threshold concepts.