Introduction
Education in healthcare has increasingly embraced learning opportunities outside of the classroom and collaboration between professions. Medical, pharmacy, physical therapy, and nursing programs all require some component of experiential education or clinical rotations.1-3 Regardless of the health profession discipline, all of these programs depend on healthcare sites and clinical practitioners to provide experiential training to their learners. As healthcare in the 21st century requires interprofessional collaboration, many allied health programs offer rotations where medical, pharmacy, nursing and other healthcare students will potentially have the opportunity to learn with and from one another. Utilization of practice sites that embrace a model of team-based care could be beneficial to students’ learning experience and the sites’ ability to precept a variety of health profession students.4
Though experiential education is a requirement of many health professions programs, a multitude of barriers to precepting students exists. As discussed by Logan et al., some perceived barriers include loss of patient interaction time, lack of time in the workday, lack of compensation, and lack of precepting experience.5 The authors describe the implementation of workshops that provide ways to foster student-preceptor relationships, effectively teach and provide feedback, and increase time management skills.5
Over the past few decades, pharmacy curricula have made significant changes to incorporate earlier and more frequent experiential education. To ensure diversity of education, the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) requires students to complete Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experiences (APPE) in community, ambulatory care, hospital, and inpatient general medicine settings, with elective rotations to further their interests and grow professionally.3 This presents challenges as students complete experiences at different experiential sites, typically requiring orientation and electronic medical record training at each site.
Many large, state-funded schools have access to a university-associated health-systems that can serve as experiential education sites for students. This allows for continuity of training and streamlining the rotation scheduling process.6 For non-affiliated programs, partnerships are formed with health-systems without university ties to precept their students. Schools of pharmacy are required to conduct quality assurance assessments at these and all experiential rotation sites.3
Concentrated learning experiences, or block scheduling, enable students to strengthen clinical and professional skills in an individual healthcare setting while decreasing orientation and onboarding time.6-9 Ultimately, the goal is to best prepare students for postgraduate training and advanced pharmacy practice roles. At this time, there is a paucity of literature comparing perceptions of a single school’s APPE partnerships at multiple healthcare sites. We sought to compare student experiences at two independent university affiliated programs.