دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله یکپارچه سازی ارزیابی عملکرد و توسعه تخصصی مداوم داروسازان جامعه (سال 2007)

یکپارچه سازی ارزیابی عملکرد، حفظ شایستگی و توسعه تخصصی مداوم داروسازان جامعه

Integrating Performance Assessment, Maintenance of Competence, and Continuing Professional Development of Community Pharmacists

1 Introduction

The self-regulating health professions in Canada are mandated to ensure that licensed practitioners provide safe and effective care. To fulfill this mandate, regulatory authorities have been established within the provinces, with coordination of policies at the national level. For the profession of pharmacy, the provincial organizations are known as the Colleges of Pharmacists while the national organization is the National Association of Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities (NAPRA). This situation in Canada is similar to that in many westernized countries, including the United States, where there are State Boards of Pharmacy and the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy. Other countries have more centralized regulatory authorities such as the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain.

Historically, health professions regulatory authorities focused on fulfilling their public protection mandate by ensuring that health care professionals were competent at the time of entry to practice. For Canadian pharmacists, the requirements for licensure include the need for candidates to have graduated from a pharmacy program accredited by the Canadian Council for Accreditation of Pharmacy Programs (CCAPP),1 passed the Pharmacy Examining Board of Canada’s (PEBC) Qualifying Examinations2 and a Jurisprudence Examination, and completed a NAPRA-approved structured internship.3 Substantial effort and resources continue to be dedicated to ensuring that these requirements remain current and effective. This has resulted in modifications in the CCAPP accreditation criteria to include pharmaceutical care-based educational outcomes and teaching strategies that encourage lifelong learning,1 while the PEBC has expanded beyond written assessments to include competency-based objective structured clinical examinations (OSCE).2

In parallel to these enhancements in entry-to-practice requirements, regulatory authorities also developed systems to ensure the continuing provision of safe and effective care by practitioners. Initially such programs were limited to investigating and managing patient complaints against members. As the discovery of health-related information grew, however, new methods were needed to ensure that practitioners’ knowledge was continuously updated and incorporated into practice. Continuing education (CE) was introduced to address this need, with a range of professions in multiple countries introducing mandatory CE as a requirement to maintain licensure or certification.4-6 The goal of mandatory CE was to assure the public of the continuing quality of care provided by practitioners.7 As experience was gained with mandatory CE, however, research evidence documented that mandatory CE was ineffective at influencing practice performance.8,9 This led the professions, including pharmacy, to pose questions such as: ‘‘Is a better system possible? Could a different model produce the desired, or better, outcomes? How, and by whom, can professional competence be assured?’’.10 (p6) The purpose of this article is to present a new model for assurance of continuing competency of practicing pharmacists and to describe the research needed to validate this model.