The pharmacy profession is relatively young in India and has passed through a chequered path. Today there is a paradigm shift from the existing industry oriented approach to service and patient centered curriculum in pharmaceutical academic parlance. There is a drastic change in the approach of Pharmacy Council of India (PCI) to the problems plaguing the profession. There is also a glaring attitudinal change in the student and teachers perception of pharmacy profession. All these indications auger well for the profession in realizing the ultimate objective of producing a seven star pharmacist.
In the recent years pharmacy education has grown well enough to generate highly skilled and technical manpower to man the wide spectrum of pharmaceutical activities associated with the manufacture and sale of drugs/medicines in the country. At present, there are over 350 pharmacy institutions offering pharmacy education at diploma and degree level and more than 70 institutions which are offering PG education. Presently every year about 21,000 D.Pharms, 8,000 B.Pharms, 600 M.Pharms and 100 Ph.Ds join the profession.
Globalisation has revolutionised the pharmacy education process across the globe. Today pharmacy educational system is a knowledge intensive industry under service sector with the entire globe as a market where every individual works for profit making. The students are customers and pharmacy teachers are promoters and the pharmacy institutions are service providers. Pharmacy colleges and institutions are doing international care and are becoming part of global network. Few pharmacy colleges in the country are already having understanding with institutions, industries at national and international level for collaborative research programmes. Terms like internationalisation, globalisation of pharmacy education are making rounds.
Changing scenario
Sea changes are taking place in every sphere of pharmacy academic activity. The perceptible changes are in the following areas:
1.Orientation changes at the pharmacy institutions.
2.Orientation changes in the syllabus of pharmaceutical sciences.
3.Orientation changes in the faculty of the colleges.
4.Orientation changes in the instructional system.
5.Orientation changes in the pharmaceutical research.
6.Orientation changes in the functioning and academics of pharmacy colleges.
7.Paradigm shift in the regulatory authorities.
Orientation changes at the pharmacy institutions
The pharmacist plays an important role in the discovery, invention, development, manufacturing and distribution of drugs and pharmaceuticals. Hence many pharmacy colleges are going in for updating their R&D activities. The innovative steps in this direction are:
1.TIFAC - CORE projects.
2.National institutions of excellence.
3.Accreditation and grading.
4.Industry-Academic tie-ups.
5.Internationalization
6. Student exchange programmes.
TIFAC - CORE projects: The Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) to create centres of excellence launched relevance and excellence in achieving new heights in educational institutes. The best examples are CORE centres at Department of Pharmacy, MS University, Baroda and The Centre at JSS College of Pharmacy, Ooty. The primary aim is to upgrade these colleges into advanced research centres in pharmaceutical sciences and to involve them in frontier research in pharmacy.
National institutes of excellence: NIPER at Mohali is doing extremely well in having highly qualified and talented pharmaceutical academicians, a good input for qualitative research. Five more branches of NIPER are in offing at different places in the country, which will give a booster to brilliant scholars for research activity. This step prevents 'brain drain'. The 'brain drain' refers to the migration of highly qualified and talented manpower from a developing country in which it has been trained at considerable expense to a developed country for greener pastures.
Two types of factors have been identified to be the probable causes of brain drain namely push and pull factors. The former refers to the adverse conditions in the developing countries that provoke immigration while the latter refers to the favorable conditions in the developed countries that make immigration attractive.
Accreditation and grading: Quality and productivity of technical education is related to economic development and providing service to the community. Quality is the responsibility of every member of the organization. Hence, majority of the pharmacy institutions are taking initiative to develop strategies for shaping and implementing quality improvement policies at all the levels of pharmacy colleges. Steps are on anvil for getting NAAC grading and ISO certifications, which are benchmarks for proving quality of pharmacy education today.
Industry-Academic tie-ups: Many pharmacy colleges in the country are entering into partnership with pharmaceutical industry. This is to ensure a high degree of industry involvement in the governance, academic services, employment, resource mobilization and utilization of facilities. Since partnership demands mutual support and co-operation, the institutions would offer a variety of services to the pharmaceutical industry like consultancy, prototype development, problem solving etc. The major areas of synergic partnership are curriculum development, mutual exchange of resources and expertise between industry and institutions, instructional process and resource generation.
Internationalisation: Internationalisation includes both import and export of pharmacy education.
Export -
"Establishment of a campus abroad. Eg. BITS, Pilani has started a campus at Dubai. & MAHE (Manipal Academy of Higher Education) has started a campus in Malaysia.
"Partnership with a foreign university/institution. Eg. JSS College of Pharmacy, Mysore with Repatriation Hospital, Adelaide, Australia for Hospital Pharmacy practice programme. Similarly Gulbrga University, Gulbarga, Karnataka has tie-up with University of Suntherland, UK for synthetic medicinal chemistry work pertaining to TB and other infectious diseases.
Import -
"Establishment of a campus by a foreign university
"Partnership with a local university institution for offering a joint programme, this may involve partial residence in the foreign university (termed twinning) or recognition for the credits earned in the Indian institutions.
The regulatory framework has been established for entry and operation of foreign universities in India which is aimed at ensuring maintenance of norms and standards laid down by the AICTE and safeguarding the interests of local students. There is also a mechanism for establishing and granting equivalence and recognition of foreign pharmacy degrees, this task is entrusted to the PCI.
Student exchange programmes
Some countries like Germany have initiated DAAD fellowship exchange programme where Indian research scholars and faculty doing their research works are allowed to work in select universities in Germany followed by brief internships. The objective is to provide international R&D and industrial exposure to bright M.Pharm and Ph.D. students. It also has the additional advantage of providing much needed qualified manpower to German University Research Labs which were finding it difficult to attract local students to academic research and also avoiding brain drain concerns.
Orientation changes in syllabus of pharma sciences: The pharmacy colleges and the universities in the country are adopting syllabus for undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in pharmacy to achieve the following objectives.
¢Produce highly practice oriented pharmaceutical professionals.
¢Develop relevant practical skills and attitudes in identified areas in these professionals.
¢Enhance their flexibility and adaptability to different work situations.
¢Develop strong analytical, managerial and problem solving abilities to solve real problems of the world of work.
¢Generate competence and confidence to tackle problem of interdisciplinary nature.
¢Promote development of entrepreneurship so as to make Pharmacy education a valid avenue for job creation.
¢Develop abilities of self-learning, independent thinking, analyzing and decision making etc.
The important innovations in formulating the syllabus are:
1.Credit based learning.
2.Flexibility in course offerings.
3.Emphasis on development of professional orientation
Credit based learning offers greater flexibility and facilitates credit transfer from one programme to another. Instead of prescribing a particular number of courses of study to be completed in a particular time frame for the award of degree, the students will be required to acquire the fixed number of credits for this purpose. This pattern can be seen in pharmacy bachelor's programme of BITS, Pilani.
Flexibility in course offerings has a variety of stream-based courses leading to specialization in a specific pharma area. Each stream will have a set of course/modules at the B.Pharm level.
Emphasis on development provides technical skills and the desirable professional attitude. Good communication skills along with a confident personality is one of the most important trait that the employer looks for when employing professionals. Hence majority of the pharmacy colleges are now a days laying more stress on communication skills and personality development.
Orientation changes in faculty of pharmacy colleges
For any college, faculty is the most valuable asset and hence all the pharmacy colleges in the country are vying one over the other in increasing employee retention and over all workforce morale. Pharmacy colleges are nowadays adopting the following innovative educational techniques like defining tasks, forming groups, course material preparation, proper evaluation etc.
Scientists and technologists from national laboratories and expert professionals from pharmaceutical industry are also appointed as adjunct faculty to help close the perceived gaps in teaching and also serve as an effective mechanism to promote industry-institute interaction.
Changes at instructional level
There is a drastic shift in the instructional pedagogy being adopted by several pharmacy colleges in the realms of communication and IT revolution. Following instructional strategies using different media and methods are being employed by the colleges like seminars, group discussions, live problem based case studies, field and industry visits, industry based projects, computer simulations and experimentation, demonstrations, multimedia presentations, computer assisted learning, internet based learning and laboratory instructions.
Lot of emphasis is being placed for curriculum development. Some of the important innovations in this regard are: analysis of a range of practice situations in which the pharmacy graduates are expected to perform. Having interaction with the pharma industrial personnel covering a wide range of activities could do this. Search conference could be one of the efficient mode for such an analysis. Other steps are pilot try out, preparing scheme of formative and summative assessment, designing learning modules, preparing scheme of study, identifying courses and problems along with industry work and selecting appropriate industry problems through which requisite learning can take place.
Changes in pharma research
There is a significant change in India pertaining to ongoing research in pharmaceutical sciences. The significant developments are:
"Promotion of sponsored research and consultancy on the live problems pursued by the national R&D agencies and pharmaceutical industry.
"Mission oriented pharma projects in national interest related to the development of indigenous capability in pharma production. Some good measures are endemic disease preventive drug development, development of AIDS vaccine, dengue treatment etc.
"Introduction of national doctoral fellowship under which 50 fellowships are offered to selected candidates who are pursuing their doctoral programmes in 10 designated institutions in pharmaceutical sciences.
"Plans are in offing to introduce a 5-year integrated bachelor's degree in pharmacy on par with US programme of BS in pharmacy.
Changes in functioning & academics
Several innovative steps have been initiated in this regard for efficient functioning of the pharmacy colleges with minimum trouble. Some of the perceived changes are:
"College constitution - policy matters - periodic revisions.
"Human recourse management - recruitment / increment / promotion.
"Regular meetings (college/department level) recording the proceedings, action taken reports.
"Drawing annual calendar and adhering to it.
"Internal quality improvement process.
"Monitoring staff punctuality/campus discipline etc.
Academic orientation and changes are as follows:
"Student counseling
"Lesson planning - maintaining teacher's diary
"Feedback mechanism with corrective measures
"Conduction and evaluation methods for laboratory, class, project and seminars
"Framing and upgrading curriculum
"Project group formation
"Management of academically weak students
"Planning and practicing extra and co-curricular activities
"Recognizing and rewarding innovative teaching related activities
"Training and placement activities
"Infrastructure maintenance
Many pharmacy colleges in the country are placing more emphasis on the indices of merit. Some of the important indices of merit for pharmacy colleges are:
"Process in place
"Faculty profile
"Infrastructure
"Academic performance of the students
"Campus culture
"Placement and training
"Value addition activities
"Credibility/image of the college
Paradigm shift in the regulatory authorities
Till now, pharmacy education is regulated by bodies other than its own. The institutions imparting pharmacy education are being controlled by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
Now, the Pharmacy Council of India under the dynamic leadership of its president, Dr B. Suresh has taken initiative of amending the pharmacy act and providing more teeth to the PCI. Henceforth according to the new proposals, the PCI will be the sole regulatory authority over the pharmacy education in the country.
The AICTE & PCI are dual regulatory authorities. In professional health related courses like Medicine, Nursing, Dental and Physiotherapy only the professional councils have full control over their professions. But the pharmacy education is facing the brunt of dual control due to which lot of academic time is lost in fulfilling a wide array of norms and regulations. Hence steps are being taken to bring pharmacy education under the complete control of PCI only and no more AICTE hassles.
The steps required for quality pharmacy education in the country are:
¢Upgrading the present pharmacy institutions by strengthening of faculty, equipment, research and optimizing them should be give priority than trying to create new one. Creating more centres of excellence equally distributed to all parts of the country will also help in the advancement of pharmacy education.
¢Upgrading the B.Pharm course and making it a five-year-course so that the course is on par with the other counterparts of the developed nations like USA and UK.
¢An effective pharmacy education policy should be drawn up governing the pharmacy education.
¢Strengthening of PCI for better control over pharmacy education at Degree, PG and Research levels.
¢An all India entrance examination board for conducting an aptitude test for admissions to pharmacy courses.
¢An all India pharmacy staff selection service board on par with UPSC should be created for recruiting teachers to various colleges and universities offering pharmacy courses.
Conclusion
The success for the pharmacy institutions always depends upon its missions and optimum utilization of material and human resources. The International Pharmaceutical Federation has recommended for stepwise implementation of good pharmacy practice in developing countries. The aim is to promote good health. Hence the next generation pharmacy institutions should give preference to hospital pharmacy and clinical pharmacy which are the subjects of social relevance to the society.
(The author is Principal,Veerayatan Institute of Pharmacy and Dean, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences,KSKV Kachchh University, Kutch.)