Abstract

Background: Pharmacy profession has undergone a significant paradigm shift with movement away from a traditional distributive role toward a clinical and patient oriented practice, which has intensified the focus on teamwork and the importance of inter professional relationships. Objective: To assess attitudes of instructors and graduating class students on challenges of clinical pharmacy training in Haramaya University. Methods: a prospective cross-sectional study design was used. The data was collected using pre-tested, self-administered structured questionnaires which will have socio-demographic variables, work load, total credit hours taken, engagement on clinical training, presences of advisor, receiving comment from clinical pharmacists and role model clinical pharmacist. It was also contain questions on the different challenges with five scale likert scale. The collected data was cleaned, coded, entered to Epi data. The entered data was transferred to SPSS window version 16 statistical software. Frequencies, cross tabs, and non parametric Mann Whitney test was done to analyze the data. Result: from a total of 43 graduating pharmacy students 37 were included in the study with a response rate of 80%. Among them 22(59.5%) were female. The mean age of students was 22.81 ±0.877. 23 of the students were joined pharmacy school by their own interest. 14 (37.8%) of the students were strongly disagreed that the curriculum was designed taking the countries current pharmacist need. 11(29.7%) of students were strongly disagreed that the class rooms were designed to facilitate the teaching-learning process. Majority of students about 27(73.0%) were strongly disagreed that the school had a well organized laboratory. 12(32.4%) and 16(43.2%) of students were strongly disagreed and disagreed that prescribers were willing to hear their comments while 14(37.8%) and 12(32.4%) of them strongly disagreed and disagreed that prescribers were accepting their comment. From 22 instructors working in the school only 20 responded the questionnaire which made the response rate 90.9%. Among them 17 were males. Eight of the instructors were aged 24 and 25 years and the mean age was 26.65. Nine of them were first degree holders. Only 4 of the instructors were strongly disagreed that the curriculum was designed taking the countries current pharmacist need. Nine of the instructors were strongly disagreed that there were sufficient reference materials. Conclusion: clinical pharmacy training is challenging in conditions where instructors and students believe there are no sufficient reference materials and the prescribers are not cooperative.

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