Pharmacy Education and Conducting OSCE Exam During COVID-19: An Overview

Abstract

Advances in pharmacy practice have transformed the role of a pharmacist from traditional dispensing to more patient-centered care practices. Apart from the traditional dispensing practices, pharmacists are currently assigned to provide pharmaceutical care services focusing on identifying medication-related problems, taking a medication history, patient interviewing, and designing an evidence-based care plan. The advancement of the pharmacist's role to be part of the health care team to maximise the health care provided to the patient should be met with restructuring the pharmacy education and assessment from being focused only on medicine compounding, selling, and dispensing to include pharmaceutical care provision. Undergraduate pharmacy education has changed tremendously over the years, evidenced by the shift from a customer-based approach to a patient-centered approach using different clinical learning and examinations models such as Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). OSCE exam is considered a powerful and valuable tool for evaluating pharmacy students' clinical performance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, pharmacy education and examination are globally affected. Many pharmacy schools are confronting surpassing challenges to sustain education during the COVID-19 pandemic. The global experiences of academics and healthcare instructors in delivering emergency remote teaching, ensuring purposeful experiential pharmacy student placements, communicating and supporting the displaced or isolated pharmacy students are considered an accelerating opportunity for new models of pharmacy education. Therefore, this chapter aims to have an overview of pharmacy education during the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenges to online pharmacy education, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on pharmacy learning and education. Also, to have an overview about conducting OSCE clinical examination during COVID-19; the online OSCE exam preparation, set up, implementation, and assessment during COVID-19. Finally, to describe what can happen in the future to the online pharmacy student clinical education, OSCE assessment, and examination.