A group of 5th year students of the PharmacyDegree have taken part in the first ECOE exam to be held in a School of Pharmacy and Nutrition in Spain to evaluate the competences developed in the subject of Tutored Stays.

This methodology professor - which has been applied for a decade in the School of Medicine of the academic center and also in other Schools of Pharmacy in the UK and USA - is a classic demand of the students of Degree to be able to have an exam that measures their clinical competences.

In this first test a pilot exam was chosen - the goal is that next year all 100 students of Degree will be evaluated with this method - which lasted two hours divided into five stations (the ECOE are structured in about twenty stations): The first 3 allow the simulation of cases with patients; a fourth station is oriented to identify pharmaceutical forms and drug information from the carton, and a last station simulates of resolution of queries from information sources.

"The ECOE will serve to evaluate the clinical skills and knowledge that students have acquired throughout the entire Degree and that they have put on internship during the last months of degree program in the supervised internships. In this mandatory subject students spend 6 months in a pharmacy office and/or in the pharmacy service of a hospital, which is why it is so important to evaluate them with a method that validates the clinical competencies they have learned," explains the coordinator of Tutored Internships, Professor Guadalupe Beitia.

Obtain information, evaluate it and communicate a solution

"During the test, students have to be able to obtain information about the patient's needs related to medications and their health problems, evaluate it, make decisions and communicate with them appropriately and effectively," details the also professor of the Degree of Pharmacy.

During this academic year 97 5th year students of Degree Pharmacy have made a total of 162 stays or internships, as some of them divide the stays in periods of 3 months to get to know both community and hospital pharmacy. Of the 162 internships, 93 took place in the community setting and 69 in the hospital setting. In addition, 17 students spent time abroad, mostly in the United Kingdom and France.

Finally, in future courses the School is considering applying the format of assessment ECOE to Degree of Human Nutrition and Dietetics.