A Continuing Professional Development Program for Pharmacists Implementing Pharmacogenomics into Practice

Abstract

A continuing professional development (CPD) program for pharmacists practicing in community and team-based primary care settings was developed and evaluated using Moore’s framework for the assessment of continuing medical education. The program had three components: online lectures, a two-day training workshop, and patient case studies. Knowledge (pre-post multiple choice test); attitudes, readiness, and comfort with applying pharmacogenomics in their practices (pre-post surveys); and experiences of implementing pharmacogenomics in practice (semi-structured interviews) were assessed. Twenty-one of 26 enrolled pharmacists successfully completed the program, and were satisfied with their experience. Almost all achieved a score of 80% or higher on the post-training multiple choice test, with significantly improved scores compared to the pre-training test. Pre- and post-training surveys demonstrated that participants felt that their knowledge and competence increased upon completion of the training. In the follow-up, 15 pharmacists incorporated pharmacogenomics testing into care for 117 patients. Ten pharmacists participated in semi-structured interviews, reporting strong performance in the program, but some difficulty implementing new knowledge in their practices. This multi-component CPD program successfully increased pharmacists’ knowledge, readiness, and comfort in applying pharmacogenomics to patient care in the short-term, yet some pharmacists struggled to integrate this new service into their practices.

Independent Community Pharmacists’ Experience in Offering Pharmacogenetic Testing

“…2 Pharmacists are playing a leading role in the delivery of PGx testing [3][4][5][6] and have been proactive in developing training opportunities and core curricula to prepare the pharmacist workforce to participate in this new professional role. [7][8][9] Professional pharmacist organizations and accreditation bodies have also recognized the future role of the practice and have updated pharmacy school curricula so that all pharmacists have a minimal level of exposure to PGx content. 10 Several surveys of pharmacists have reported enthusiasm for testing and provision of PGx services, but raise concerns about their knowledge/preparedness and reimbursement.…”

Teaching psychiatric pharmacogenomics effectively: Evaluation of a novel interprofessional online course

“…The latter half of this statement is particularly relevant because CPIC is a National Institutes of Health (NIH)‐funded organization of PGx experts that publishes PGx guidelines—including several pertaining to antidepressants and genetic variants in drug‐metabolizing enzymes 25‐27 . Relatively few educational opportunities for non‐pharmacist professionals have been made accessible to providers that give special consideration for the unique issues related to these psychotropic PGx 28‐33 …”

Pharmacogenetics in Pharmaceutical Care—Piloting an Application-Oriented Blended Learning Concept

“…Furthermore, we aimed to evaluate the participants’ development of competencies and attitudes towards PGx testing in pharmacy practice based on their self-perception. Therefore, we applied a self-assessment questionnaire adapted from a recent project on the topic published by Crown and colleagues [ 15 ]. In the adapted questionnaire, participants were asked to score their agreement with 13 statements describing their knowledge, competence and attitude towards PGx testing on a five-point Likert scale, before and after attending the complete digital training program.…”

“…The participants did not consistently answer all questions of the satisfaction questionnaire, which is why the number of answers may differ from the total number of participants. Overall participants expressed their satisfaction with the training program, by mainly strongly agreeing to recommend the course to a colleague (79% (15), n = 19) and mainly rating the complete course as excellent (79% (15), n = 19). The asynchronous, self-study online module was generally rated as good or excellent (29/67% (6/14), n = 21) and participants largely agreed or strongly agreed with the user-friendliness of the learning management system used (38/43% (8/9), n = 21) as well as with the desire to attend further trainings with similar online modules (48/38% (10/8), n = 21).…”

“…Meanwhile, numerous post-graduate training programs for pharmacists on pharmacogenetics are available, and amongst others are widely offered in the USA and Canada [ 15 , 16 ]. However, to our knowledge, no such in-depth, post-graduate training program is yet available in Switzerland.…”