There has been an increased emphasis on scholarly activities by health sciences faculty members given the importance of the promotion of public health over the last 50 years. Consequently, faculty members are required to place greater emphasis on scholarly activities while maintaining their teaching and service responsibilities. This increasing requirement of scholarly activities has placed great demands on clinical practice faculty members and it has made their management of clinical practice, teaching responsibilities, and expectations for promotion and tenure a difficult task. This retrospective literature review identifies barriers to the scholarship activities of clinical faculty members in dentistry, medicine, nursing, and pharmacy and discusses strategies for enabling faculty members to pursue scholarly activities in the current health science academic environment. The review indicates commonalities of barriers across these 4 disciplines and suggests strategies that could be implemented by all of these disciplines to enable clinical practice faculty members to pursue scholarly activities.

Objective. To document teaching evaluation practices in colleges and schools of pharmacy. Methods. A 51-item questionnaire was developed based on the instrument used in a previous study with modifications made to address changes in pharmacy education. An online survey service was used to distribute the electronic questionnaire to the deans of 98 colleges and schools of pharmacy in the United States. Results. Completed surveys were received from 89 colleges and schools of pharmacy. All colleges/ schools administered student evaluations of classroom and experiential teaching. Faculty peer evaluation of classroom teaching was used by 66% of colleges/schools. Use of other evaluation methods had increased over the previous decade, including use of formalized self-appraisal of teaching, review of teaching portfolios, interviews with samples of students, and review by teaching experts. While the majority (55%) of colleges/schools administered classroom teaching evaluations at or near the conclusion of a course, 38% administered them at the midpoint and/or conclusion of a faculty member's teaching within a team-taught course. Completion of an online evaluation form was the most common method used for evaluation of classroom (54%) and experiential teaching (72%). Conclusion. Teaching evaluation methods used in colleges and schools of pharmacy expanded from 1996 to 2007 to include more evaluation of experiential teaching, review by peers, formalized selfappraisal of teaching, review of teaching portfolios, interviews with samples of students, review by teaching experts, and evaluation by alumni. Procedures for conducting student evaluations of teaching have adapted to address changes in curriculum delivery and technology.Keywords: teaching, evaluation, assessment, survey INTRODUCTIONIn 1998 an investigation of practices used to evaluate teaching in schools of pharmacy was conducted, 1 and the results were compared to a similar study conducted 20 years previously.2 At 100% of the responding colleges and schools, students evaluated classroom teaching, and at 96% of the colleges and schools, students evaluated experiential teaching.1 At 50% of the colleges and schools, faculty peers evaluated classroom teaching, and at 13% faculty peers evaluated experiential teaching. Other evaluation methods, including self-appraisal, evaluation by alumni, portfolio review, interviewing samples of students, and review by teaching experts were rarely used. 1Since the 1998 report, 9 studies addressing various aspects of teaching evaluation have appeared in the pharmacy education literature. One study measured pharmacy student opinions at 1 school of pharmacy regarding the usefulness of the classroom teaching evaluation instrument employed. Students reported they completed the instrument in an honest fashion but were cynical about whether the instrument was associated with faculty accountability or changes. 3Three studies examined Web-based online evaluations and compared them to traditional paper evaluations. The online methodology was assoc...

In recent years, researchers have found significant differences among racial, ethnic and gender groups in the ways they respond to and metabolize drugs, and experience side effects. Most studies have focused on cardiovascular, psychotropic and central nervous system drugs. Alcohol, antihistamines and analgesics are other agents with varying effects among different racial, ethnic and gender groups. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) noted last year that Asian-Americans show increased sensitivity to beta blockers. It also observed that African-Americans are less responsive to ACE inhibitors. Gender differences in drug therapy seem to basically evolve around psychotropic drugs. Environmental, cultural and genetic factors are involved in determining response to medicines in different racial, ethnic and gender groups. Continued research in this area will undoubtedly reveal significant information regarding racial, ethnic and gender differences in response to drugs. These developments will impact on how clinical trials are conducted and challenge conventional thoughts regarding restricted formularies.

Objectives. This study compared the results of traditional student evaluations of classroom teaching with those of faculty self-evaluations and with the results of evaluations by smaller, representative subsets of students. Methods. Students enrolled in required courses completed teaching evaluations, and 31 faculty members self-evaluated their instruction using the same 12 evaluation items given to the students. Students used a 5-point, ordinal response scale, and faculty used a visual analog scale. Within each professional year, representative subsets of 24 students were selected. Results. There were no overall differences between the scores for faculty members' self-evaluations and the scores for evaluations by the whole class of students, with one exception: responses to the evaluation item "the pace of presentation." At the level of individual instruction, there was no significant difference between responses given by faculty members on self-evaluations and those given by whole-class ratings for a mean of 7.31 items. There were no differences between the overall ratings given by the whole class and those given by a subset of students from that class for 91.7% of the instruction sessions. Conclusion. Faculty self-evaluations and evaluation by representative subsets of students can enhance the evaluation of faculty teaching.

Haemophilus influenza, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Aerococcus species were tested for susceptibility to chloramphenicol by standard broth microdilution and disk-diffusion methods. MICs and zone diameter breakpoints were correlated with production of chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT). A comparison of MICs and zone diameters indicated that the interpretative criteria for H. infiuenzae and S. pneumoniae should be an MIC of-4 ,ug/ml or a zone diameter-25 mm for susceptible strains and an MIC of-8 ,ug/ml or a zone diameter of-20 mm for resistant strains; for Aerococcus species, interpretative criteria should be an MIC of c8 ,ug/ml or a zone diameter of-20 mm for susceptible strains and an MIC of .32 ,ug/ml or a zone diameter of s 12 mm for resistant strains. Ail but four strains of H. infiuenzae and one strain of S. pneumoniae that were resistant to chloramphenicol by these criteria produced CAT. For Aerococcus species, however, chloramphenicol-resistant strains were negative for CAT as determined by a commercially available disk test. When comparing susceptibility results with CAT production, thiamphenicol was a better indicator of the presence of the enzyme than chloramphenicol and may be useful in assaying resistance to chloramphenicol. Detecting chloramphenicol resistance in Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae when trying to relate results of in vitro susceptibility tests to chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) production has been a problem which has been of increasing relevance since chloramphenicol resistance has occurred in these species (2-5, 7). Recently, the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS) revised the breakpoints for H. influenzae to better correlate CAT production with chloramphenicol-resistant strains of H. influenza (12). The NCCLS did not, however, change the breakpoints for S. pneumoniae, an organism also known to produce CAT (2, 6, 7). Even though chloramphenicol is not a drug of first choice