April 29, 2022
UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy faculty members Kathryn Fuller, Pharm.D., Adam Persky, Ph.D., and Nicole Pinelli Reitter, Pharm.D., are recipients of this year’s Award for Excellence in Assessment from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP).
The award acknowledges an assessment initiative or project that improves a Pharm.D. program through continuous quality improvement, according to the AACP website.
The team’s entry focused on their Redesigned Entrustable Professional Activity Assessments in Pharmacy Practice Experiences which were implemented into Experiential Education at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) are workplace responsibilities that directly impact patient care. The School utilizes EPAs to evaluate students on clinical rotations. EPAs also allow preceptors to provide feedback to learners on specific workplace activities, Fuller said.
“Receiving the AACP 2022 Award for Excellence in Assessment is incredibly exciting as we feel our work in EPA assessments is leading the way for many other schools of pharmacy. Additionally, we are excited for the opportunity to share our revised experiential assessments at the AACP Annual meeting,” Fuller said.
The team said EPAs are relatively new to pharmacy education. The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy was one of the first schools of pharmacy to implement them. Originally, EPAs were established in medical education for residency training, so many schools of pharmacy have trouble assessing EPAs and providing meaningful feedback to student learners. The team’s project adds to the literature on how to implement EPAs accurately and effectively into pharmacy education, Persky said.
Persky added there were three goals for the team’s project: to separate formative feedback and grade determination to obtain an accurate assessment of student performance and feedback; ensure the final grade from each experience is more reflective of student performance on rotation as assessed by the preceptor; and revise the grading scale to Pass / Fail to reduce stress and/or anxiety regarding the impact of high or low pass grades on future employment/training opportunities.
“Our initial efforts indicate the changes made to the EPA assessment tool are addressing the desire to separate the EPA feedback in clinical training from the final grade determination,” Reitter said. “We are currently updating our program outcomes and much of this early work is helping guide this discussion especially around APPE-readiness. We hope in the future that our updated assessments will continue to provide students with accurate and useful performance feedback allowing them to move into the world of pharmacy practice as leaders. Additionally, we hope to provide modifications based on preceptor feedback and ensure these are not only evidenced based, but user friendly.”
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