Educational Need Assessment with the aim of Fostering Capabilities of Pharmacy Students to Create Value in the Pharmaceutical Industry

The industry is one of the significant fields in the professional careers of pharmacists. Pharmacists operate throughout the industry with a variety of functions and responsibilities that require a variety of practical skills to achieve. There is relatively limited curriculum content, however, in the general pharmacy curriculum that can be applied to cover many of the roles of pharmacists or be useful in enhancing the skills used in the pharmaceutical industry. In this study, we have tried to identify the necessary skills and the required training in a systematic context using the opinions of all stakeholders. For this purpose, an expert group consisting of representatives of the university (faculty and students), the Food and Drug Administration, the Syndicate of Pharma Industry and graduate pharmacists in the form of a focus group meeting were introduced.
The data were identified through content analysis of review sessions and training needs related to value creation skills in the pharmaceutical industry. Finally, 132 training sessions under 25 topics in 5 different modules were extracted.
The results demonstrate that the development of a systematic infrastructure to provide integrated training in the context of the relationship between industry and academia, using the experiences of industry experts can play a significant role in improving the preparedness of pharmacy students to work in the pharmaceutical industry.