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Objective. To teach pharmacy students how to apply transactional analysis and personality assessment to patient counseling to improve communication. Design. A lecture series for a required pharmacy communications class was developed to teach pharmacy students how to apply transactional analysis and personality assessment to patient counseling. Students were asked to apply these techniques and to report their experiences. A personality selfassessment was also conducted. Assessment. After attending the lecture series, students were able to apply the techniques and demonstrated an understanding of the psychological factors that may affect patient communication, an appreciation for the diversity created by different personality types, the ability to engage patients based on adult-to-adult interaction cues, and the ability to adapt the interactive patient counseling model to different personality traits. Conclusion. Students gained a greater awareness of transactional analysis and personality assessment by applying these concepts. This understanding will help students communicate more effectively with patients.

Objectives. To determine whether completion of a patient counseling course improved pharmacy students' perceptions of the importance of pharmaceutical care and whether there was a difference in students' perceptions of pharmaceutical care provided in retail settings compared to that provided in clinic settings. Methods. A pre-course and post-course survey instrument was designed to measure students' perceptions of the importance of pharmacists' performing 20 items describing pharmaceutical care. Also, each student wrote a technical report describing a counseling encounter observed between a pharmacist and a patient. This report was subject to content analysis. Results. After taking a patient counseling course, students perceived five out of 20 pharmaceutical care tasks performed by pharmacists to be most important. Also, student analyses of pharmacist/patient interactions indicated that barriers to communication were fewer, students' experiences were more educational, and privacy, monitoring and assessment were better in clinic settings. According to students' perceptions, the application of pharmaceutical care was different between clinic and retail settings. Conclusions. Therefore, teaching the concept of pharmaceutical care and incorporating it into a patient counseling course is more educational when a clinic setting is used.Keywords: pharmaceutical care, patient counseling, clinic, community pharmacy INTRODUCTIONPharmaceutical care has been described as a multifaceted process that results in positive outcomes for patients through identification, resolution, and prevention of drugrelated problems.1 For many years, pharmacists have been in transitional roles, moving toward a target of providing pharmaceutical care. Through strategic planning, pharmacy schools anticipated this transition and have begun preparing students for evolving professional roles with more patient-centered care and counseling, expanded drug use monitoring, appropriate drug selection, and responsibility for patient outcomes.Pharmacy schools have a duty to provide pharmaceutical care education for students regardless of future practice settings since the fundamental elements exist in a variety of settings.1 Teaching methods should be designed to instruct students how to provide pharmaceutical care with a process to evaluate students' ability to provide this care. 2Projects implemented to evaluate the provision of pharmaceutical care in simulated settings have been described in the literature. 3Although pharmacy students are taught in the classroom, students should also be exposed to practice environments at an early stage in their curriculum. This will help empower them to practice in covenant relationships with patients. A national survey distributed to pharmacy school faculty who teach communication revealed that the most innovative programs teach communication skills early, with additional courses to integrate and reinforcement communication throughout the curriculum. 4 Furthermore, the respondents in the survey valued the use of real p...

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