UofT first-year PharmD students to assist community pharmacies during flu vaccine season

The University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy recently launched an accelerated three-year PharmD program, giving students the opportunity to get into the field faster. According to Natalie Crown, the program’s director, students will be receiving the same amount of instructional weeks (in fact, one extra!), while wrapping up their degrees in just three years. For Crown, training new pharmacists faster will not just help with the pharmacist shortage around the country, but will also make completing their studies more affordable by limiting the amount of time they need to be in the city. Accelerating the PharmD program means teaching basic pharmaceutical sciences and clinical sciences together, and getting students into experiential learning opportunities in their first semester. “We wanted to give students the ability to apply their learning in the classroom in an authentic pharmacy practice environment early on,” Crown explains. So, students work in community pharmacies once a week in their first year to get that early exposure. This semester, the first year students will be assisting pharmacies in their fall vaccine campaigns. “We made a point to integrate immunology and our vaccination curriculum really early on in their first course, and then we did all that skills-based training so that they’ll be able to give injections,” says Crown. “Now, they’re prepared to give flu and COVID vaccines.”Dulain Abeyratne, a first year PharmD student, was excited but nervous to start his rotation in a community pharmacy. Abeyratne, who just completed the first week of his placement, says he hopes to build confidence with patient interactions. Even simply watching how his preceptor talked to patients and acknowledged their concerns was inspiring. Being in a real pharmacy “is such a great environment to learn, even just by observing.” For Crown, empowering students to be able to do injections is a big help for pharmacists and a boon for public health. “Right now, we’re heading into what is likely going to be a busy flu season, and it looks like it may be a bad year for Canadians,” she says. “Having a pharmacy student to assist with injections will be helpful to that pharmacy team as they’re juggling multiple activities.” More hands on deck, after all, will help to lighten the workload for everyone.“People say that pharmacists are very accessible to the public, but it was really cool to see how a patient could come in and just ask questions and get care,” Abeyratne says. “There aren’t other professions where the public can come without an appointment and get evidence-based information from an expert they can trust and that really stood out to me during my experiential learning.”

UofT first-year PharmD students to assist community pharmacies during flu vaccine season

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