Competencies

Pharmacy competencies: their relative importance to consumers, practitioners, educators, and students.

McGhan WF, Hurd PD, Johnson CA, McKennell TM.

The pharmacy profession increasingly is involved in developing and maintaining competency standards as objective criteria in evaluating the educational process and in judging practitioners' continuing competence.

This study compared the rankings of various pharmacy competencies among diverse populations, specifically, consumers, practicing pharmacists, pharmacy educators, and pharmacy students.

The competencies were assessed through a questionnaire which required the respondents to rank 17 competency labels in order of importance. The questionnaire was completed by 104 metropolitan residents and additional samples included 450 practitioners, 39 pharmacy educators, and 217 pharmacy students. Interesting differences appear between the rankings of the competencies among the consumers, practitioners, faculty, and students.

Results indicate that consumers highly ranked the traditional roles of the pharmacist as a drug distributor. Faculty tend to rank highly the clinical roles of the pharmacist. The highest rank correlations on pairs occurred between students and faculty (0.89) and between pharmacists and consumers (0.89). The lowest rank correlation occurred between faculty and consumers (0.64).