The design and evaluation of a clinical clerkship for hospital pharmacists

Forty hospital pharmacists participated in a two week pilot of a postgraduate clinical pharmacy clerkship, utilizing different hospital services as teaching sites at the University of Illinois and Cook County hospitals in Chicago. The clerkship provided eighty hours of instruction in the clinical setting under the guidance of experienced clinical faculty. Though designed as an introductory clerkship for teaching basic clinical skills, general medicine floors were used as instruction sites as well as specialized services including emergency medicine, neonatology, surgical oncology, cardiology and an out-patient rheumatology clinic. Key findings include: the two week clerkship and its emphasis upon basic clinical skills was a meaningful educational experience for both participants and faculty; the limited time frame of the clerkships made crucial the instructional design including systematic development of objectives and faculty preparation; an improvement in participant performance on all but one objective was observed between the 3rd and 10th day; the clerkship enhanced the confidence of participants with respect to the performance of basic clinical skills; and the clerkship experience broadened participants' conceptions of the depth and scope of the clinical pharmacists role. These results indicate that a two week clinical clerkship can be a useful vehicle for pharmacy postgraduate education.