Establishing Quality Measures for Community-based Pharmacy Practice Experiential Education by Miranda Steinkopf

Prompt:

msteinkopf1 — 2025-06-30 12:46:34 UTC

How can our assessment and guidance document be effectively implemented and used by schools, sites, and preceptors? What additional training, support, or resources would be helpful for implementation? What barriers might exist, and how can we overcome them?

Goal:

msteinkopf1 — 2025-06-30 12:47:42 UTC

Focus on practical application, stakeholder engagement, and continuous quality improvement.

Prompt:

msteinkopf1 — 2025-06-30 12:49:06 UTC

How would you use this tool to support and develop preceptors, if at all? What support or training should be provided to help preceptors meet the expectations outlined in our definition?

Goal:

msteinkopf1 — 2025-06-30 12:49:31 UTC

Discuss preceptor development, mentorship, feedback mechanisms, and recognition.

Prompt:

msteinkopf1 — 2025-06-30 12:50:17 UTC

How can we maintain consistency in experiential education quality across diverse community pharmacy settings (e.g., chain vs. independent, urban vs. rural)?

Goal:

msteinkopf1 — 2025-06-30 12:50:49 UTC

Identify challenges and solutions for standardizing experiences while respecting site-specific differences.

Prompt:

msteinkopf1 — 2025-06-30 17:23:49 UTC

Prompt:

msteinkopf1 — 2025-06-30 17:24:01 UTC

Goal:

msteinkopf1 — 2025-06-30 17:24:09 UTC

Focus on practical application, stakeholder engagement, and continuous quality improvement.

Goal:

msteinkopf1 — 2025-06-30 17:24:27 UTC

Focus on practical application, stakeholder engagement, and continuous quality improvement.

2025-07-20 15:21:25 UTC

The items in the checklist match what many EE programs are using, but they are often hard to observe. Include questions that could be asked of the site to assess whether they are meeting each criteria.

2025-07-20 15:24:26 UTC

Will be really helpful to use these documents to add more details into EE documentation in CORE because EE is constantly being asked to justify itself.

Break up into why could be done during initial onboarding and assessment vs. site visit.

2025-07-20 15:26:12 UTC

Add details on what data sources could be used to assess each item - initial onboarding, site visits, student evaluations, etc.

2025-07-20 15:27:18 UTC

Add guidance around correct action plans when sites receive does not meet a criteria, including guidance on when to engage leadership on something that is not within the site’s control. Rather than collective action plans, could use to triage to appropriate learning experience to appropriate EE opportunity based on what the learning experience can and can’t offer.

Checklist feedback

2025-07-20 15:29:56 UTC

Would be nice to list out what data source is recommended to assess each of the preceptor qualities. We thought of student eval, site visit eval and preceptor self-assessments.

The self assessment would be good to do for preceptor orientations to in order to set the expectations.

Staffing

2025-07-20 15:31:26 UTC

A major barrier is having enough staff and capacity of both the faculty and sites to ensure these metrics/assessment are being met.

CORE

2025-07-20 15:31:39 UTC

Core services 130 pharmacy schools. Is there a workgroup to provide feedback and best practices for core. Need better dashboards and way to assess preceptors use of evals ( ie are they putting comments?)

angela_clauson — 2025-07-20 15:31:43 UTC

Implement at the chain pharmacy supervisor level to identify sites that would deliver a good educational experience.

2025-07-20 15:31:43 UTC

Several of these assessment items are hard to assess/observe in a short site visit. The role of the student’s perspective of these assessment items would be very helpful as part of an annual review of sites.

Also, a preceptor self-assessment of these items prior to the site visit would be an important and helpful tool.

Another thought was what is the role of larger corporations to assist us in determining which of their sites best fit these criteria?

angela_clauson — 2025-07-20 15:33:02 UTC

The school could develop the necessary checklist items and provide education to the preceptors so that they have the tools needed to deliver a good educational experience.

Outcome of checklist

2025-07-20 15:33:12 UTC

If use the checklist, outcome would continue, professional development needed, or removal of preceptor. Recommendations on when/where to draw the line on participating as a preceptor.

2025-07-20 15:33:32 UTC

Consider opportunities that this affirms the importance of community pharmacy to our sites and preceptors and connect them to additional opportunities and resources to help keep them engaged and connections in the face of adversity and skepticism about the future of community pharmacy.

Assessment Use

2025-07-20 15:33:52 UTC

Can be used as a self-assessment tool (site/preceptor onboarding) and/or tool for site visits for site development.

2025-07-20 15:35:51 UTC

Need a category about safety. Concern for students going to the site like robbery, car jacking, nefarious activities outside and within the site.

Apply for designation

2025-07-20 15:36:13 UTC

We like the idea of the preceptor applying for a Preceptor Excellence designation. This would then allow the program to focus on those preceptors who feel they meet the general criteria. The program can determine what metrics need to be met for each characteristic.

2025-07-20 15:37:18 UTC

Is there an opportunity within NCPA to promote high quality sites that are willing to take students from anywhere because many schools don’t have access to large local CPESN networks.

State licensure requirements

2025-07-20 15:37:49 UTC

Inconsistencies between state licensure requirements and the degree of detail needed for each experience.

Checklist

2025-07-20 15:38:00 UTC

Could this be used as a self assessment? Both baseline and ongoing perhaps with preceptor/site visits?

*Might this be better applied as a range (scale 1-5) for "meets" or "does not meet"?

Encourage sites to assess staff buy-in before sending students; Preceptors do not practice in a vacuum.

Would require revisions before being adopted as a "standard" or "recommendation" for assessment; many items are highly subjective.

2025-07-20 15:38:01 UTC

Quantifiable measures for each assessment item for ease of identifying meeting definition.

Broad Application

2025-07-20 15:39:22 UTC

Criteria are general enough that you could apply across the board to all preceptors, so as not to single out a group. Utilize as a preceptor self-assessment and implement at onboarding and on a routine basis (every few years?).

Barriers

2025-07-20 15:41:00 UTC

Length

Buy-in

Opportunities:

2025-07-20 15:41:38 UTC

Use it for quality improvement

Clarifying if the checklist is a self assessment, site evaluation by the school, or both.

Could schools work with sites when partially meets or does not meet to find opportunities to get better.

Schools could trial the checklist with a few sites before rolling it out to all sites.

Does it need a purpose statement to orient the preceptor?

Could schools revamp their student evaluations and/or preceptor evaluations to match this?

The checklist could seem punitive. Clarifying this is for QI and improving IPPEs and APPEs.

Careful thought on how those items are ordered on the checklist. Direct patient care services and staff support are listed first. Those may be growth opportunities at some sites.

2025-07-20 15:42:16 UTC

Question for the research team: how do you anticipate the materials be used when a site does not meet a criteria?

2025-07-20 15:42:33 UTC

Clarification on how many items the preceptor has to meet to be considered excellent. Is it all items? Are some partially meets acceptable? Do they have to meet all the aspects of each characteristic?

Patient Counseling

2025-07-20 15:42:35 UTC

Direct emphasis on self-care consultations and medication counseling is an important element of excellent community practice missing from the guidance document

Preceptor resources

2025-07-20 15:43:10 UTC

If a site does not meet an item from the checklist, provide resources for development.

support for activities

2025-07-20 15:45:07 UTC

Even when categorizing IPPE sites as community there are still vastly different characteristics that support the implementation of the assessment rubric. It really depends what the primary operation of the pharmacy is, is it dispensing or patient care services.

The integration and level of investment of faculty and university resources in the site can assist in ensuring there is time and resources to ensure the activites can occur.

2025-07-20 15:46:31 UTC

This would be useful for preceptor development, figuring out strengths and weaknesses of sites to utilize quality sites, designation of community sites in selection systems (like CORE) that students see when selecting.

It would be helpful to have brief preceptor orientation documents. Maybe consider creating a site self-assessment/ action plan based on this tool.

Barriers-site interpretation of this assessment, how to orient them

2025-07-20 15:50:09 UTC

For a site self evaluation, make it concise and format the guidance document into a questionnaire. Short, simple, clear.

2025-07-20 16:02:25 UTC

Could use as a mechanism to feed preceptors if score below a certain threshold. Perhaps there is a library of resources. But have to be thoughtful about how approach attitude with providing resources. Perhaps provide resources for specific areas of deficiencies? But also need to balance how much is sent out to preceptors.

2025-07-20 16:03:01 UTC

A great way to use this would be for schools to up the expectations but also streamline their documentation.

2025-07-20 16:05:35 UTC

Opportunity to align this with work done by Megan Smith and others on defining advanced community practice - would allow a way to condense all this valuable information into a global assessment

2025-07-20 16:08:35 UTC

Schools should consider upping their standards and removing community sites that truly aren’t offering high quality learning experiences to help drive practice. There are instances of schools removing sites and the sites then rising and doing more so they could get students back.

2025-07-20 16:09:06 UTC

Could these criteria and expectations be made into a set of standardized online training modules focusing on best practices in community pharmacy precepting? Even better if preceptors select the schools they precept for and, upon completion, the schools are made aware?

Site Variability

2025-07-20 16:12:45 UTC

Consider that standardization needs to be broad enough to include different services that let students gain skills practicing key activities (applying PPCP in either med counseling or OTC, etc.). Careful not to exclude unique and beneficial sites

Student past experiences need to be considered for placements, e.g., paid intern jobs or extensive tech work.

Expectations

2025-07-20 16:16:47 UTC

Ensure preceptors understand programmatic expectations from what college expects. These tools could be helpful to bridge that gap

Support and training

2025-07-20 16:20:25 UTC

Provide a virtual preceptor development program (free CE) to review the tool and qualifications.