Highlights
The Faculty of
Pharmacy was established at 1991. The profession of pharmacy is
considered a very dynamic area. This is due to the rapid changes in
pharmaceutical industry and health care system. The development of
pharmaceutical industry over the years in providing pre-packed
medications restricted the traditional role of the pharmacist to a
compounder and dispenser of medicine. In health care systems, significant
changes required pharmacists to adopt total responsibility for
pharmaceutical needs of patients in hospitals as well as the development of
pharmaceutical care plans for individual patients. Therefore, the pharmacy
profession has to adopt a more patient-oriented approach so that pharmacists
can expand their role as advisors for both patients and other health care
professionals within the health care team.
In the past, pharmaceutical education was mainly
drug-oriented concentrating on the art of compounding and detailed description
of drug properties. A second phase of pharmacy education then concentrated on
product formulation. This phase was associated with the introduction of
physical pharmacy, pharmaceutical technology, structure-activity relationship,
and drug design.
Later, pharmacy education was more biologically
oriented with emphasis on pharmacokinetics and drug equivalence. Therefore,
topics like biopharmaceutics, pharmacokinetics, and clinical therapeutics were
introduced. It was then followed by a patient-oriented phase where topics
like clinical pharmacy, community pharmacy, and communication skills were
introduced.
Recently, pharmaceutical education has moved further
toward a more patient-centered and practice-centered approach rather than being
drug-centered and product formulation centered. We, at the Faculty of Pharmacy
at Al Isra Private University, are closely observing these dynamic changes in
the pharmacy profession since the establishment of the Faculty of Pharmacy back
in 1991. Accordingly, we have modified our undergraduate curriculum several
times to cope with these changes. The general features of these modifications
were mainly the following:
First: Improving the quality of practical courses to better
reflect on education and quality of our undergraduates.
Second: Emphasizing the clinical pharmacy orientation by
introducing several core courses in this area as well as the area of
therapeutics and pharmacy practice.
Third: More emphasis has been addressed to
pharmacy training in a community or a hospital pharmacy to cover major
classes of drugs regarding their therapeutics and patient consultation.
Fourth: Introducing new elective courses that cover new areas
and trends in pharmaceutical sciences to suit the needs of our undergraduates
and their prospective employers.
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