(318) Pharmacy Student Attitudes in Experiential Education

Objective : To evaluate student attitudes relating to the causes for unprofessional behavior during an experiential education rotation.

Methods: The Office of Experiential Education presented students with a professionalism scenario and requested feedback via an open-ended question. The qualitative data from this survey question was aggregated and coded within several different categories of causes for unprofessionalism: student-driven, faculty/school-driven, and preceptor/site-driven. These categories of causes were then further grouped by common themes to discern student-identified causes of unprofessional behavior more granularly.

Results: The 148 individual responses were categorized into student, school, or preceptor responsibility. One individual response could be categorized into multiple areas of responsibility. After categorization, there were 171 responses of those 9 responses were eliminated from the analysis as they did not provide a cause for the behavior. Of the 162 categorized responses, (59 %) placed the responsibility on the student, 28% of the responses placed the responsibility on the school, and 14 % placed the responsibility on the site/preceptor. The largest student driven cause was due to lack of motivation skill and respect (72%). For the site preceptor driven causes the 32% noted the cause that the preceptor was not motivating or interesting enough. For the Faculty/School driven factors 53% of those responses were insufficient professionalism education provided by the program.

Conclusions: Students think that there are multiple areas contributing to unprofessional behavior of students during experiential education rotation. Schools of pharmacy who are aware of student perceived causes of unprofessional behavior can target areas for targeted intervention in all three areas.