Advancing pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences through the academic capacity assessment handbook

Abstract

The FIP Academic Institutional Membership (AIM) is the global network interconnecting schools of pharmacy and academic pharmacy leaders. The vision of FIP AIM is to advance leadership in education of pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. Its mission is to support communication, collaboration and focus on areas of concentration that are identified as global relevance for the evolvement of pharmacy education in support of the profession’s transformation within the FIP Workforce Development Goals. This is the second in a series of handbooks developed by FIP AIM as a result of the work undertaken within an area of concentration. The focus of the area of concentration was academic capacity. Academic capacity building facilitates actions that contribute to ensuring quality and relevance of pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences education. Capacity building is essential to guarantee that education is responsive to the transformation of the profession in alignment with sustainable workforce development that is in positive support of socio-economic needs within the healthcare ecosystem. Building academic capacity was identified as an area of concentration for FIP AIM in response to membership needs, data from the FIP-UNITWIN workshops, and as an action towards strategic outcomes for FIP in terms of ensuring educational infrastructure that supports innovation in pharmaceutical sciences and collaborative integrated healthcare. For this action, the FIP AIM working group adopted the concept of academic capacity building considering three dimensions of capacity development, namely the development and strengthening of skills, competencies, attitudes and environmental aspects at individual, organisational and institutional levels. At the same time, the dimensions were applied from both internal and external perspectives. The internal perspective looks at academic capacity building in the academic environment whilst the external perspective addresses the academic and scholarly development of graduates to provide a pharmaceutical workforce that contributes to evolvements in science and practice of pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. The working group approached this action by reflecting on the domains that are relevant to the dimensions and perspectives established, and by working on developing a framework that can be adopted by schools of pharmacy globally to establish gaps and identify challenges specific to that context. This would provide the leadership team with a metric to support strategic development, and methods that can be adopted to contribute to academic capacity. The handbook consists of nine domains that cover: 1) professional development, partnerships and advocacy; 2) mentorship, diversity and internationalisation; 3) quality assurance, curriculum design, experiential learning and portfolios; 4) technology and digitalisation; 5) capacity and capability of teaching staff; 6) innovations in programmes of study; 7) scholarly activities and research expectations; 8) distance and online learning; 9) support staff; and, 10) policy and strategy development, and implementation for capacity building. The domains connect horizontally so that there are areas which overlap. At the same time, each domain may be applied separately, providing the flexibility for application within the different global contexts and needs. In conclusion, the academic capacity assessment handbook aims to contribute to bridging the gap between capacity building in pharmacy education and improved health outcomes, and to support academic pharmacy leaders to identify and implement innovative strategies for academic capacity building. It is hoped that this handbook has a snowball effect and following its use in different schools of pharmacy around the world, the handbook can be evolved in order to strengthen its robustness and practicality. We look forward to hearing of experiences of application of the handbook or parts of it.