Student Interprofessional Collaboration Experiences in Community Pharmacy

Interprofessional education for pharmacy students aims to promote early understanding of roles and rehearse collaboration with other health professional trainees. How such structured, campus-based exposure translates into collaboration during experiential learning is less clear. We studied how pharmacy students describe collaborative experiences during advanced pharmacy practice experiences in community pharmacy.

Twenty-two participants in a longitudinal diary study kept records during their fourth-year advanced pharmacy practice experience in community pharmacy. At 3 intervals during the 8-week rotation, students submitted reflections in response to specific prompts. Entries described how students enacted interprofessional care and collaborator roles. Students wrote freely without definitions from pharmacy or interprofessional frameworks. Follow-up interviews provided additional insights. We conducted reflective thematic analysis of diary entries and interview data.

We analyzed 52 diary entries and 13 interviews. Students reported frequent collaboration with prescribers, primarily, physicians, typically via fax or phone to resolve drug access issues, answer drug information requests, and address therapy problems. Interactions with other health professionals were opportunistic, varying by site, and rarely integrated into daily routines. Documented collaboration with pharmacy staff, patients, or families was infrequent. Students developed collaborative communication skills to suit to the community setting but contrasted delayed access to other professionals and insufficient patient information with their hospital-based experiences.

Pharmacy student interprofessional care in community pharmacy was physician-centric. Opportunities to collaborate with other professionals were limited and incidental. We recommend intentional curricular strategies to equip students with strategies to proactively initiate collaborative relationships when care is shared across physical spaces.