- About
- Organization
- Organization Overview
- Dean’s Office
- Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences
- Department of Clinical Pharmacy
- Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
- Quantitative Biosciences Institute
- Org Chart
- Research
- Education
- Patient Care
- People
- News
- Events
Town Hall: Learn about our latest admissions cycle and match results
By UCSF School of Pharmacy Editorial Staff / Tue Apr 6, 2021
An update on our PharmD education
Vice Dean Sharon L. Youmans, PharmD, MPH, talked about the latest news from our PharmD program.
Updates this week included several topics and speakers.
- Admissions and the virtual interview process, Joel W. Gonzales
- Residency match results and upcoming commencement events, Cynthia Watchmaker, MBA, MEd
- Teaching and learning virtually, Igor Mitrovic, MD
- APPEs, Valerie Clinard, PharmD
- In-person skills training, Crystal Zhou, PharmD
- Education technology, Cynthia V. Zarate, MS
- Anti-racist curriculum task force recommendations, Michael Grabe, PhD
Video transcript
Show/hide transcript
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the School of Pharmacy's town hall. My name is Sharon Youmans and I will be serving as the moderator of our town hall discussions. Our Dean Joe Guglielmo, could not be with us today and sends his regards. The topic for our town hall is the PharmD program, reflections and updates. It's been a year and a few weeks since we transitioned to remote learning due to the pandemic, and a lot has happened from the pandemic with over 500,000 lives loss to COVID-19, the ongoing protests for racial and social justice in our local communities and across the country, we all have gone through and are going through a lot. And the pandemic is still with us, with the one bright bright spot being the availability of vaccines. What we have planned for this afternoon is to provide reflections and updates of how we've done this past year, and what the plans are for the upcoming academic year. We all have worked and continue to work hard to support the PharmD program. It is a true team effort of our faculty, staff and our students. We have extended the time today to go to 4pm. So please submit any questions you have via the Q&A function, and we will answer them at the end of the presentations. So our first presentation is from admissions and Joel Gonzales will provide his update.
[Joel Gonzales]
Thank you, Sharon. When Sharon asked me originally if I would be interested in sharing some information. My first question was you want me to talk about all the stress we experienced over admissions interviews this year? But I'm glad to share a little bit now that we've had a chance to kind of reflect on what we experienced. But first of all, I have to thank all of those that played a part in the process this year, the virtual format requires so many of you to step up and lean in and help us. We have spent the last many years really trying to streamline the admissions and the interview process to create a system that relied on as few people as possible, knowing how stretched our faculty are and knowing how stretched our students are and just the limited bandwidth everyone. This year, we had to pivot and it required so many people to be involved in the process. So I just want to thank everyone who's on this webinar for helping us get through this interview season. We had 48 faculty interviewers, we had 40 student interviewers and 54 more student chat room hosts. So there were just a lot of moving pieces in this process. I really, really want to thank publicly five individuals who stepped up in the fall and created our interview blueprint, our standardized interview, which made the process run so much smoother, because we really had a standardized process for all interviews to follow. So Robin Corelli, Candy Tsourounis, Michael Grabe, Samantha Valle-Oseguera and Trang Trinh. I can't thank you enough for really just stepping in and creating that blueprint for our interview teams. This past year, we interviewed 255 candidates over 10 days, 10 very, very long days. And we only had three minor technical issues with interviewers. But we were able to solve those problems immediately. So it didn't impact the interviews themselves. And from an administrative point of view, we only had one misplaced candidate. And once we placed them in the wrong room, we immediately knew that that was an error. And so we were able to correct that. And so basically, our interviews were fairly error free, which is quite surprising considering how many people were involved. You know, how many different internet connections were at stake, but it was a successful process from our point of view. So with our admissions offers, you know, there were a lot of unknowns, a lot of variables and factors that we simply didn't know how they would affect admissions decisions. And admissions officers this year. One could we maintain our yield rate of candidates if they weren't able to visit the campus during the interview and we know that's a huge selling point for us to really deliver that sort of UCSF magic once somebody gets on the campus and has a chance to meet our faculty and students. Two with a new public California PharmD program opening this year and admitting students for their first class impact our acceptance rate. And three, would the idea of virtual interviews have an impact on out of state candidates? Meaning would they be more likely to interview with us as there were no travel expenses involved yet not accept our offers, given the cost of San Francisco compared to wherever they were living or other offers that they received in cities that were not as costly as San Francisco. What we found was mostly boring news, which you know, is quite welcomed, I guess, during a period of uncertainty. Our initial yield rate remained very high. In fact, it was slightly higher than last year at 82 percent. And a yield rate when we talk about admissions mean the number of individuals who accept our admissions offers. And so that was about again 82 percent. And I suggest that this is probably the highest in the nation, given what I know about pharmacy admissions and the landscape across the country with other pharmacy programs. The second, the new PharmD program didn't really have a major impact on our yield rate, we did lose three people to that program. But two of them mentioned that geographic location was a major factor. So I don't even know if those two students would have accepted our offer, you know, if that school didn't exist, again, because geography was such an important decision maker piece for them. And then finally, we did make more offers to out-of-state students, with most declining the offer, which is not surprising, and it's basically our experience in the past. And so the number of out of state students entering the class this year is very similar to last year, prior to the class matriculating I will as always, circulate more demographic information on the entering class, and there's it's still fluid and there's still going to be some changes, we'll still be admitting some people off the waitlist as we move into the spring and into the summer. And I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge to people who are a part of our admissions team, Edgar Micua, our admissions coordinator, and Lauren Anderson, our outreach coordinator, who both of these individuals really stepped up in this process. And those of you who interviewed know that those two were individuals, you saw when you came into our virtual door, and created an environment that was supportive and encouraging for the students who went through the process. I'll be on the webinar and happy to take any questions at the end. So thank you very much.
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Thank you, Joel. And I would be remiss without thanking you for your leadership as our Director of Admissions and coordinating like a maestro. There's that whole process of Thank you very much. At this time, we will get Student Affairs update from Cindy Watchmaker.
[Cindy Watchmaker]
Thank you, Sharon. And thank you, Joel. And good afternoon, everyone. As I begin to talk about what's happening with our classes of 2021. It really represents the yin and the yang, that is the Office of Student and Curricular Affairs. The first thing I want to talk about is the recent ASHP residency match. students received their results recently, and the match rate in phase one for our students graduating in 2021 was about 70 percent. 80 percent of those students are doing residences in California, we have a number of students that are participating in phase two of the match. And we know a lot of faculty and staff have been helping students navigate that process. We've been hearing a lot about interviews and students preparing for interviews. And so the final story with residency is for our class of 2021 is yet to be told, the phase two results will come out on the 14th of April. We also know that a lot of students have secured fellowships, we have some students moving to other degree programs. And so the true picture of the outcomes of our two graduating cohorts will be clear to us in late summer and early fall.
And so we will be providing that to everyone. This is obviously a time of celebration for students in the classes of 2021. Many of the students in our legacy curriculum finished their final APPE last Friday, and so are officially graduated. We are preparing for commencement for our classes. And we had told those classes from the very beginning that they would each cohort would have its own commencement ceremony. And while those have moved to a virtual format for 2021 we're very excited about celebrating all of the success and accomplishments of these fantastic graduates. The ceremonies are taking place on May 15 for our class of 2021P in the legacy curriculum and on May 21 for students in our transformed curriculum. An email went out yesterday for you as faculty, staff and students to send your congratulations and greetings either a photo or a message to our classes. And we encourage you to do that. That will be part of the closing of our commencement ceremony. Our speaker this year is Dr. Richard Carmona, the 17th, Surgeon General of the US, and he is doing to two different commencement speeches, one for each class. So we invite you to join us from the comfort of your own home or wherever you are. To celebrate these commencements. We had a lot of activity in the comments and chats when we did this for the class of 2020, 2020. So please stay tuned for that. This past year, a huge shout out to our student organizations for their creativity and maintaining the programs and community under virtual circumstances. They've done an incredible job continuing to demonstrate their leadership and commitment to professional development within our student community, we will be celebrating their leadership and their contributions, as well as the accomplishments of our students in receiving scholarships. At a student awards ceremony that will take place later in April. It will be a virtual event, as they all are. And we are pleased that Mike Maddux from ACCP and a member of class of 1979 will be our keynote speaker for that event. As I think about all the things that we've all gone through, I have to also mention the way in which the staff in the OSCA has worked behind the scenes to support students under these difficult circumstances. Our advisors have so many stories of challenge with students. They've helped students through health related issues, how COVID is affected family members and loved ones, and how students mental health has had its ups and downs through this pandemic. But we think that they're strong support has been a part of this story in supporting students this year, and so much of it is one-on-one with students. But they're definitely part of our education year in reflection. It's also true that there are a lot of behind the scenes things that happen. And one of the things that so important to our students while they're in the program and as they graduate is licensure as interns and as pharmacists. And that's not a process that is happening online. And so I want to point out the sort of heroic efforts of Lucia Piraino and Joshua Louis, in making sure that we don't miss a beat in helping our students get the licensure that so important as they enter the program. And now as we work with our classes of 2021 as they exit, it has definitely been a team effort. We've appreciated support and input of our staff colleagues as well as faculty. It has been a quite a year. But there's a lot of celebration in the month ahead with our graduating classes and all of our students getting through this year. As Joel said, I'm happy to take questions later on, and turn it back over to Sharon.
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Thank you, Cindy. And thank you for your just exceptional and outstanding leadership of the OSCA and supporting our students through their journey here at UCSF. So thank you. Now I'll turn it over to Igor Mitrovic. And he will talk about remote learning and teaching.
[Igor Mitrovic]
Thank you for sharing. Good afternoon, everyone. It is a pleasure to be sharing our experience about remote learning. It's It's been a year of teaching online. It has been quite a year. We are now in the middle of the theme that has been the first one to actually move and migrate online. It's been hard for all of us, for students for faculty transitioning to these new conditions, just as it has been for all of you. In the meantime, through going through this year with our didactic classes, both skills and the integrated core curriculum, we have learned a lot what we have seen and what we have experienced is that our students have been exposed, as Cindy has said, to lots of difficulties, a lot of stress there was hard time creating the environment in which they felt that they belong to a class, because everybody was in their own little environment, seeing their classmates only online. And we are happy to see that we are finally with the help of the vaccines and things being in much looking up in better, in the Bay Area, students are starting to get inside and see each other and we are having some things that they're being done in person. That said, we have learned a lot about ourselves, students have learned about themselves. And they have actually, in some ways benefited from this weird natural experiment that none of us would actually wish upon ourselves, again. So what we have learned is that there are some benefits to having some things online, so much so that it is probably would be wise on our part to think about what are the things that we have learned that we could potentially keep? Now, I'm not saying that we are going to keep all of these things, but for example, our attendance, lecture attendance in classes that are not mandatory, it's been very high, comparably much higher than has been in person. Partly perhaps, because students have actually don't have to commute and students who are not living on campus where, for example, that Mission Bay in order to come to, to Parnassus, they actually spend almost two hours traveling every day. So we have actually higher attendance to like the lectures hire candidates in office hours. But we have also seen that there are some things that cannot be replaced, that cannot replace classroom learning, particularly skills, all those activities, where the one-on-one interaction in person is critical for the student student learning. All that said, what I'm really, really happy to report to you that we have not seen negative impact of the online learning on our students performance on the assessments. When we compare all of our didactic assessments, summative assessments, there is really no difference between the year before where we have actually had in person learning, and current year. So this is, I would say a huge compliment to our students, and to our faculty who have done everything in their power in their power to make sure that students are not suffering from learning online, they have made themselves available, almost 24/7, to be there when students need them to support them. And, I will out of character, finish my finish my remarks right here, in order to preserve some more time for any questions you might have to share.
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Thank you, Igor. And I want to thank you for your leadership and leading all the theme directors and working with the students. Thank you very much through these difficult times. Now we will hear about experiential education from Valerie Clinard.
[Valerie Clinard]
Thank you, Sharon. So a little over a year ago, as we were planning to launch the class of 2021, which included the P and T cohort COVID-19 hit and mid-March, the Shelter in Place Order was initiated at least in San Francisco and then soon to other parts of the state. At that time, we had 50 of our partner sites that close to student learners. So the experience or Education team pivoted to create a path for the successful completion of APPEs and on time graduation of both cohorts. Our guiding principles included ensuring that students were prepared next steps professionally, and that we met accreditation requirements while still keeping everyone safe. The number of rotations for the class of 2021 was reduced from eight to six, schedules were done for a second time, and the experiential education team worked with sites and preceptors to develop ways to continue rotations with on site, remote and hybrid experiences. This week, we entered the last APPE block for the class of 2021. Congratulations to the class. Students preceptors and faculty completed a year of unexpected challenges such as navigating COVID testing requirements, PPE requirements, quarantine requirements and many others. Everyone remained flexible and committed to learning, committed to patient care, patient safety, and student and site and safety. The EE team also launched a new APPE evaluation tool during this time that incorporated the evaluation of entrustable professional activities, experiential education faculty and OEIS staff partners quickly transcend the planned preceptor development trainings to five online webinars. And as such, we were able to train 400 preceptors to complete this training between November. The IPPEs also continued, and the class of 2022 completed their summer health system rotations, again with a focus on flexibility and commitment to keep patients and sites safe. The P2s will launch into their APPEs in May and will complete eight APPEs next, starting next month. Over the last year, the experiential education team, students and preceptors learned a lot about the value and importance of flexibility, ways to ensure student pharmacists are central members of the healthcare team during a public health emergency, and best, and maybe some not best practices for remote clinical learning. We are still learning from this past year, and plan to carry forward the things that can continue to bring value to education and patient care. And finally, I would really just truly like to say a huge thank you to the students, preceptors faculty and staff for making this happen. And we're very excited about the graduation for the class of 2021.
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Thank you, Val. And I want to thank you for your leadership of all of this. This, for the class of 2021 P and T, was several years in the making, and planning for the overlap year. And I want to thank you and the program directors and of course also our partners and working and being flexible to get our two cohorts graduated. So thank you. Now we'll hear about our applied patient skills course from Crystal Zhou.
[Crystal Zhou]
Thank you, Sharon. Good afternoon, everyone. So I'll be talking a little bit about the in-person learning that we have been doing as a majority of our didactic teaching has been online, but we have still been bringing in students to teach those skills that absolutely must have to happen in person. So you may have heard about our immunizations training that happened in the fall for our Q1 cohort. And it was great, perfect timing that all of them were trained, before the COVID vaccine came out. We again brought the P1 cohort back on campus for the second time just last week for their blood pressure training. So we had the students split up into small groups, and they had the opportunity to take each other's blood pressure. And the goal was really for them to just hear something, because in the past, we would have two sections for the students to practice taking blood pressure in person. But now since we've reduced that down to one session, we just wanted to make sure everyone could at least hear a blood pressure and the goal was accomplished. We made sure everyone heard a blood pressure. And it was actually only the second time that some of these students were seeing each other in person. So they really enjoyed coming and interacting with each other. And it was so funny because they had commented on, "Wow, I didn't expect some of the classmates to be so tall," because everyone is about the same height on Zoom. So it's quite funny to see everyone kind of react to seeing each other in person.
[Crystal Zhou]
So along with a blood pressure skill session in April, on April 19, actually, we are hosting a P2 class, clinical skills refresher. And this clinical skills refresher will include a vital sign session, which includes a blood pressure measurement, pulse, and also respiratory rate, and also an insulin injection technique counseling session. So these two, I guess these two activities, the P2s did not get a chance to do in person. So the blood pressure and vital sign station was originally supposed to be back in March of 2020, which was when the COVID pandemic started and everything had been shut down. So we did not feel safe bringing the students back on campus. And then shortly after in August is when the insulin injection technique and counseling session would have happened. So they did all of that virtually and they did not get to be assessed in person by a faculty member which is why we're having a refresher for the students to come on campus, if they're able to, to practice those two skills.
[Crystal Zhou]
And the other session that we're making optional for our P2 students is an immunizations injection station. So if for any reason they didn't have the opportunity to practice giving immunizations at their IPPEs, then they would sign up and they have the opportunity to be paired up with someone to practice injecting IM and sub-q [cutaneous] injections. So that will be happening very soon.
[Crystal Zhou]
And then for the class of 2024, which is this incoming P1 class, we will be starting to slowly phase in our in person teaching for the skills courses. So starting with foundations and endocrine in the summer, we will be having those sessions that may be more effective to have in person. So some examples for foundations would be our immunizations, training, and aseptic techniques definitely would be happening in person. And then for endocrine, we'll be doing glucometer training and also insulin injection training in person.
[Crystal Zhou]
And then moving on for the rest of the year, we've had the skills directors pick one or two activities that would be more effective to have in person. And that will be the plan for the class of 2024. And lastly, I just really want to thank OEIS and all of our volunteer faculty that may be on the town hall today, because this, all of these in person skills would not have happened without you. And that was such a valiant effort to have so many rooms. We have to reserve two to three times more rooms and also recruit two to three times more faculty to help out with these activities. So really, thank you, everyone, for helping us. And I'll turn it back to Sharon.
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Thank you, Crystal, and thank you for your leadership and overseeing a lot of this work, because it's really important and I know that the students truly appreciate it. Thank you. So now we will hear an update from OEIS, from Cynthia Zarate.
[Cynthia Zarate]
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. As we reflect on the last year and review our numbers that will appear on the screen pretty soon, I would have to say that they're pretty astonishing. And sometimes in person, we don't realize how many sessions and how many exams we actually operationalize throughout the academic year, we would not have been able to do all of this, as everyone, I'd like to echo what everyone is saying, without the partnership with our campus colleagues such as Education Technology Services, the library, we lean on guidelines and guidance from, also from other schools such as the School of Medicine, our team, and faculty and the Student Help Desk which we have leaned on a lot throughout this academic year.
[Cynthia Zarate]
We have, since March 2020, we have operationalized a total of 10 courses, seven for the class of 2022, and three for the class of 2023. And you can see there, numbers that reflect touch points and sessions for all, for each of the courses. And in preparation for all of this OEIS trained over 50 faculty to be prepared to understand the different functions of Zoom. And as Zoom has actually developed enhancements such as co-host ability and, and different features, we have continued our training for the faculty and for residents and whoever really is conducting remote teaching for students. I would like to thank Alexa Tan and Shezar Saifee who developed the modules to teach the different colleagues for the School of Pharmacy and who actually have lead pure training to ensure that our team is trained and we have cross functional teams. Another feature is for remote teaching, we have partnered very much with ETS who has updated their interface and created channels so that students have nicer lecture captures. And also, as we look forward to the next academic year, we are going to tag the videos based on discipline. And we're also going to standardize the title to make it easier for students to search and locate different videos. I would like to also thank the Student Help Desk who has stepped in to be a backup, if there are any issues with recording. They have been able to record the sessions and if there are any challenges, we have been able to have those recordings available for students to minimize interruptions.
[Cynthia Zarate]
We also were able to adopt in terms of moving through assessments, we were able to adopt an entirely new different way of doing OSKIs. We have integrated ExamSoft and Zoom to deliver 15 OSKIs, including for the first time a complex capstone. So that is a pretty big deal because we relied initially in person on the **cannon bar and we were very restricted to the space. So we were able to deliver 15 OSKIs and 38 core exams with Examplify, so that's again, we adopted Examplify to be able to do remote proctoring and to be able to ensure the integrity of our exams
[Cynthia Zarate]
There are some new enhancements that are actually going to be available April 1, perfect timing to improve the PDF viewer experience for our exam takers. So now you will be able to search the PDF, for example, for any type of medication while you're taking the exam. So there are some improvements that ExamSoft has been developing with, with our guidance of feedback. So the student feedback has, and faculty feedback, has been incredibly important to ensure that the platforms that we are using are actually being beneficial for students.
[Cynthia Zarate]
Moving along, we're going to pilot actually OtterAI, and we partnered with our campus colleagues, the library, School of Medicine, School of Nursing, and the PT School of Dentistry, to expand accessibility for our students. So we are committed in the mission to expanding accessibility and through OtterAI live sessions will be available. We are going to provide transcripts for pre-class videos. So that is another enhancement that we're looking forward to. We will be implementing it with the GI theme, and we will be implementing it obtaining feedback and implementing it for both cohorts in the next academic year. Lastly, I won't go too much into the in person trainings, but we continue to partner with faculty to ensure that our protocols are up to date, that students are safe, that our students, staff and faculty have the necessary PPE to execute all these in-person sessions. And lastly, we're preparing to really revitalize our modules to onboard the new students that will be entering so that they can be prepared with Zoom Ilios, ExamSoft, etc. Thank you so much.
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Thank you, Cynthia. And a big thanks to the OEIS staff, your unit. Without you, it would be almost impossible for us to deliver our curriculum. So thank you very much. Last but not least, we're going to hear from Michael Grabe, and he is going to provide us some updates on our charge to create a antiracist curriculum. Michael.
[Michael Grabe]
Thanks Sharon. So, at CEPC [Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee], we've been thinking a lot about this. We've had five meetings this year already, of which I would say three of those meetings, a substantial part has been discussing these ideas. As most everyone knows, there was an anti-racist PharmD Curriculum Task Force committee that was brought together last year, headed by Tram Cat and Jon Ray. On December 4, they put forth a report of about nine pages long. And the report was charged with two things, one to summarize how the PharmD curriculum currently addresses race and health disparities, and then number two to develop targets that will result in an anti-racist PharmD curriculum. It was not their job or their mandate to go further than that. And at that point, CEPC became involved, as well as many other groups. In early or mid January, both Tram and Jon were invited to come to CEPC and present and report out on their initial findings and start open discussions about how we're going to start to implement some of the, hitting some of those targets that they identified and thinking about the weaknesses in the curriculum and where we already excel. We got better guidance from this just recently, both from the dean and the vice dean, on how to move forward on the three primary recommendations that the report spoke out on. The one is, the first recommendation, a summary of how the PharmD curriculum currently addresses race and health disparities, and summary of the targets recommended to be incorporated into the PharmD. These are pages two through nine of the report for those of you who have it. And basically our direction here is that CEPC basically has the, we've been tasked to basically review and implement, whenever appropriate, hitting those targets, from the report. It's quite general. But it's something that we're actively doing, highlighted by the fact that we spend a decent amount of our time talking about these things.
[Michael Grabe]
Number two recommendation was to initiate a health equity thread, similar to the inquiry thread, with the intent of incorporating and reinforcing health equity related learning objectives throughout the curriculum, and to support other theme and thread directors' efforts in addressing cultural diversity, health equity, and anti-racism across marginalized identities. And the response from Joe and Sharon has been to, to basically task with CEPC, the initiation or discussions about health equity threads.
[Michael Grabe]
And there's really two prongs that have been implemented along these lines, that we've all heard a little bit about already, even before the task force had their report. Jen Cocohoba and the curricular interns were basically going through and thinking about health care disparities and how they come through in our cases throughout the first two years. And they've made tremendous progress on that front.
[Michael Grabe]
And number two, just recently in the neuropsych theme, Stephanie Hsia and Rupa Tuan, have implemented seven sessions, kind of spearheading this idea of a diversity and health equity thread. And now we've actively been talking about how to continue with these, how to bring them back and review what's going on and to make sure that we continue to bring all of these things into the curriculum in a way that makes it stronger.
[Michael Grabe]
The third recommendation from the report was to provide progress reports regularly and continuously to the Dean's Office and all faculty and staff stakeholders within the School of Pharmacy, and to develop an accountability framework, with the diversity committee's efforts, of ensuring cultural understanding, inclusion, equity, and so on and so forth. The response to this, from the dean and the vice dean, to CEPC has been that we should be reporting out whenever possible to school leadership, to Academic Senate, and to student leadership groups. And so in part, me giving everyone an update about the kinds of things that we're doing, the fact that we are working hard on this, in this venue, is exactly the kinds of things we're going to do to continue forth with that. That's all that I have to talk on that Sharon, I'm going to give it back to you.
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Thank you, Michael. And thank you for your leadership in the oversight of our curriculum and to help hold us accountable. So this concludes our presentations. And now we are open for Q&A. And Grant is going to monitor the Q&A and toss the questions to the most appropriate speaker. Thank you, Grant.
[Grant Burningham]
Yeah, as Sharon mentioned, we have the opportunity to go a little bit long here, if we get a lot of questions, so feel free to ask them in the Q&A. This is a question for Cynthia's group and OEIS. With all the new functionalities and services, will we have the staff to support this?
[Cynthia Zarate]
That's a great question. You know, we're going to do everything that we can to ensure that we continue to implement high quality services in terms of our personnel. I wouldn't want to see... Sharon, if you would like to speak on that.
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Well, the ongoing evaluation of staff needs and OEIS has been going on since they were implemented years ago. So we will always do our best to ensure that we have enough staff to support because it does take a lot. Sometimes we underestimate what it takes. So that is top of mind for us all the time. So thank you for that question.
[Grant Burningham]
We may stick our landing here on time, actually, no more questions. Oh, one more came in? How is the progress of creating an anti-racist curriculum being measured? I guess that's for Michael.
[Michael Grabe]
Yeah. And so that idea of measuring the progress, I feel like we're just now getting our feet wet in terms of going through and thinking about the places where we can implement. And I think right now, in terms of expanding ideas of like a threaded idea from one theme to many, that's taking up a lot of bandwidth. I'm not thinking on my feet very well. Is there someone else that wants to try to answer that question right now?
[Sharon L. Youmans]
That is a very good question and a very fair question. Because again, it will help us answer the question, how do we know that what we're doing is making a difference? And so you know, with one of the first pilots that started with the, I called it the health disparities project, where they're looking at cases, and going through all of the themes to look to make sure that we're not perpetuating negative stereotypes, that there's opportunities to talk about race more than just a risk factor, that we have representation of different types of cases. So that is ongoing now, and the faculty have been very receptive to that. So that work is going on in terms of the health equity thread will be able to measure by what is happening and each theme so it's not like none of these topics were ever discussed in themes, but we just want to move forward and be more efficient. tensional about it. So for the neuro psych thing, they've kind of have a model that they'll be tweaking, we'll be adding some sessions to our foundations, to course to kind of prep the students for what's going to happen in year two. So it's a stepwise approach, it won't be just a magic formula that we throw out to the curriculum. And we also have to realize that there may be some things we might have to pull back on, because our curriculum as it stands now is very packed. But this is a very important topic. And I think that we have a lot to work with to be able to try something, some things will work, some things won't work, to be able to give students a wide range of opportunities to discuss these issues.
[Grant Burningham]
Okay, that's it for questions. But there's one more comment which I'll just read quickly from Robin Corelli, not a question, but a comment, that this was an excellent Town Hall, nice for all of us to reflect on how much was accomplished by all units in the School of Pharmacy and our amazing students under exceptionally challenging conditions. Thanks also to the Dean's Office for support, emotional and financial, for faculty, staff, students to be able to pull this off. Anyway, thank you. Thank you to all the presenters. Sharon, do you have anything else?
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Igor, did you have something you wanted to say, you turned the camera on? No,
[Igor Mitrovic]
No, just one I just wanted to actually expand on this assessment of our anti-racist curriculum. And part of the thing is, when one is assessing, we are very good at assessing things that are matters of knowledge and skills. We are actually now working on sharpening our assessment tools for the dispositional things and attitudes, which is actually what we are talking about here. So our curricular assessment team is working on it. We are working all together on that. And we are currently really thinking about how and what is the best way to assess essentially changing attitudes, which is actually what we are talking about when we are talking about anti-racist curriculum. Yes,
[Sharon L. Youmans]
Thank you. I'm sorry, I misunderstood. I was about measuring the work that we have to do. So it's two prongs, one, how are we going to measure that we're actually doing it and then how do we measure that it is making a difference with students? So thank you, thank you for that clarification. I saw the numbers pop up in the Q&A? Are we done grant? Yeah, that's it. Okay. Well, thank you all, for attending the Town Hall and for your participation and for your questions. And we hope that you enjoy the rest of the afternoon. Please stay well, stay vigilant, and be safe and thanks to our outstanding panelists and for the presentations. So good afternoon, everyone.
Series
School Town Hall Recordings
Tue Apr 23, 2024 | Town Hall: PharmD Updates |
Wed Nov 15, 2023 | Town Hall: AI in Pharmacy |
Tue Mar 7, 2023 | Town Hall: Strategic Plan Process |
Wed Nov 16, 2022 | Town Hall: leadership spotlight |
Thu Jun 30, 2022 | Town Hall: Gallup Survey results and introducing the next dean |
Tags
Category:
Sites:
School of Pharmacy, PharmD Degree Program
About the School: The UCSF School of Pharmacy aims to solve the most pressing health care problems and strives to ensure that each patient receives the safest, most effective treatments. Our discoveries seed the development of novel therapies, and our researchers consistently lead the nation in NIH funding. The School’s doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) degree program, with its unique emphasis on scientific thinking, prepares students to be critical thinkers and leaders in their field.