6ER-019\u2005Introducing young hospital pharmacists to scientific research: an educational project supported by a national society for clinical pharmacy

Abstract

Background Educational programmes for hospital pharmacists in our country are not focused on research activities related to original or unoriginal data analysis. All necessary competencies are rarely part of the educational training for hospital pharmacy students, and during the post-graduate school of hospital pharmacy.1 Scientific societies should fill these scientific gaps and should give the opportunity to achieve all necessary research skills and competencies. Purpose The main purpose of the project carried out by the Italian Society for Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics (SIFaCT) was to introduce some young hospital pharmacists to meta-analysis, trial-sequential analysis and Bayesian meta-analysis, and support them in publishing original research. Material and methods SIFaCT scheduled 5 days of educational training to introduce young hospital pharmacists to specific data analysis skills. The society provided on the first day a lecture by an internationally-acknowledged leader, followed by a total of four educational days of teamwork activities and data analysis simulations. For each group of three to four pharmacists, a scientific project was assigned, and each procedural step of data analysis was shared with all the young pharmacists. Participants had deadlines to perform in the following activities: literature review and data collection, data analysis, interpretation of results, choice of journal and type of article, paper drafting and submission. Results Fifteen young hospital pharmacists were selected to be part of the project as participants. They covered the following therapeutic areas: clinical oncology and haematology, diabetes, supplementary dietary intakes in chronic diseases, ancillary therapy and ophthalmology. A month after the end of the project, two papers had been accepted by two different PubMed-indexed scientific journals, while the other three papers were almost ready to be submitted. Conclusion Hospital pharmacists should be more confident with several methodological instruments. There is a lack of education in this field, both from the university programmes and scientific societies. We encouraged 15 young professionals to focus their activities on research, with the purpose of supporting them in a new increased professional awareness. Scientific societies should spend more time, money and energy in improving pharmacists’ skills necessary for a higher scientific production. References and/or acknowledgements We would like to thank Professor Andrea Messori for his great support. https://ejhp.bmj.com/content/25/Suppl_1/A242.1 No conflict of interest.