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Abstract
As part of a concerted effort to update its curriculum and facilities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Pharmacy developed a new series of laboratory courses that would provide students with better opportunities to develop skills and apply them to the modern pharmacy practice of pharmaceutical care. Curriculum revisions involved changing the compounding laboratory sequence, upgrading the video library, and tying its website to its training materials; the compounding laboratory facility was renovated to support the demands of the new curriculum. The overall goals of the renovation were to (1) increase the number of workstations in the facility, and (2) increase the ease with which students could retrieve materials necessary for laboratory projects. The renovation schedule was planned so classes were not interrupted.
The Pharmaceutical Care Laboratory (PCL) course sequence was conceived in 1993 during the planning process for implementing the entry-level Doctor of Pharmacy curriculum at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill School of Pharmacy. Faculty, preceptors, and practitioners serving on the PharmD curriculum steering committee recognized that professional pharmacy graduates entered practice with a great deal of knowledge but often without the skills, confidence, attitudes, and behaviors needed to successfully apply their knowledge to patient care. Thus, the steering committee envisioned a series of "laboratory" courses that would provide students with opportunities to apply curricular content to practice examples, which would develop the skills and abilities needed to practice effectively in contemporary pharmacy.
Curriculum Revision
In the BS Pharmacy curriculum, two semesters of physical pharmacy laboratory courses met weekly and mirrored the content presented in the required physical pharmacy courses taught in the first professional year. A typical laboratory exercise contained an experimental section in which students studied a basic pharmaceutical principle, and then a compounding part in which students would compound two or three typical examples of that type of dosage form. Many of those exercises can be viewed on the UNC Pharmaceutics Laboratory (Pharmlab) website (http://pharmlabs.unc.edu) under the "Introduction and Overview" and "Lab Procedure" sections of the Pharmaceutics Laboratory Exercises section. There was also a one-semester elective course tided "Cosmetic Science and Technology," whose three laboratories throughout the semester allowed students to compound preparations such as toothpastes, dermatological preparations, and various...