Each September, faculty and staff gear up to provide a high quality educational experience for our students. From prepping coursework and syllabi and fine-tuning classroom technology, to outlining student engagement initiatives and volunteer opportunities, there is a renewed energy throughout the School. As detailed in the School’s strategic plan, our priority is to promote excellence and innovation in teaching to improve student-learning outcomes.

Through a process involving faculty, alumni and stakeholder input, we identified that enhancing our PharmD curriculum with a focus towards the future and an increased use of technology and innovative teaching methods will improve students’ learning and help them meet the educational outcomes that have been set. With this aim in mind, we embarked on a careful review of our curriculum. This is an ongoing process, but I am pleased to share some initial changes.

Pathways in Pharmacy Practice, a required one-credit course, will introduce students to practice opportunities in pharmacy in their first year. Beginning in Spring 2019, co-curricular, interprofessional learning, and practice activities within a new course series will be formalized. In both the social and administrative and pharmaceutical sciences areas, students embarked on updated course series with new or re-sequenced classes to maximize the continuity of content and learning. For example, Managing Pharmacy Systems for Patient Care is a new course, Pharmacy Law and Regulation moves from the second to third year, and medical chemistry, pharmacology, and pharmacotherapy faculty have coordinated to sequence their course content.

As we identified pharmacokinetics as a core skill of our graduates, the Introduction to Biopharmaceutics and Pharmacokinetics course will serve as the foundation for a new Clinical Pharmacokinetics course. We also modified the compounding and dispensing course series. The first course will combine pharmaceutical calculations with dispensing and non-sterile compounding while a second course will focus on parenteral therapy and nutrition in the lectures, with sterile compounding as the laboratory. Removal of the parenteral therapy from the dosage form course allows focus on drug delivery and its role in pharmacotherapy, especially novel dosage forms and drug products such as biologics and specialty drug products.

Our commitment to evolving curriculum and hands-on learning guarantees that our students graduate with a thorough education, grounded in the latest biomedical, pharmaceutical, social and clinical science, and the practical skills to advance tomorrow’s patient care.

On, Wisconsin!
Steven M. Swanson, Dean