PHARMACY schools should implement strategies that help students integrate into the profession, researchers believe.
A meta-analysis of 22 articles found many pharmacy students struggled with "professional identity formation" (PIF), if their curriculum did not include a focus on profession integration.
"Pharmacy students find it challenging to integrate the knowledge, skills, and behaviours promoted by the curriculum with their own values," the authors said.
"While our findings agree with findings from other professions, in that both the formal and informal curriculum experiences were influencing how they saw themselves as they moved through these different contexts - for example, university to placement - pharmacy students often lacked opportunities to resolve any discrepancies," the report added.
"Without curricular interventions supporting PIF, we found that pharmacy students can form professional identities that lack cohesion with their values and experiences of practice," the study's authors added.
They said curriculum interventions tended to be one-off programs, with evaluations of outcomes limited to existing assessment processes.
They also lacked validated measures, therefore only partly aiding in grasping the outcomes of professional identity programs.
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