A Preliminary Report on the Academic Performance of Pharmacy Students in a Distance Education Program

The United States has too few pharmacists.1-3 For example, in its latest pharmacist employment survey, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores Foundation found 5,499 vacant chain pharmacy positions as of January 2003.2 The State of Florida is experiencing similar pharmacist shortages. The population growth rate in Florida is among the highest in the nation, especially among older persons. These older persons are among the most likely to seek medical care, have prescriptions dispensed, and need high quality pharmacy services. Second, the annual number of pharmacy graduates from Florida’s colleges of pharmacy per million persons was below the national average from 1990 to 1999 (17 per million versus 28 per million).4 The pharmacist shortage has been blamed for an upturn in dispensing errors and patient deaths.5 The shortage has been cited as the reason for pharmacists having less time to counsel patients; fewer pharmacy school faculty members,1 and the escalation in pharmacist salaries.3 In response to this public health crisis, there has been a relative explosion in the number of pharmacy schools in the past decade.6 However, starting a new pharmacy school or college is costly. The high cost of starting new pharmacy schools and the difficulties in finding qualified new faculty members have spurred exploration of other options for training pharmacists. For example, existing schools and colleges have increased their on-campus class sizes or, when there are space or resource constraints, they have used other means of increasing their class size, such as distance education programs. Recently, with the requisite advances in technology in place, several colleges and schools of pharmacy have started distance programs. These programs include both synchronous (eg, Nova Southeastern University, Texas Tech University) and asynchronous (eg, University of Florida) curricular delivery methods. Some programs are primarily distance-based (eg, Creighton) with students coming to campus 1 or 2 weeks per year, versus hybrid programs (eg, University of Florida, Nova Southeastern University) where students regularly come to a local campus for routine interactions with faculty members and peers. In this fashion, a quality program can be offered to a larger number of students through a hybrid approach of combining educational technology with smaller numbers of faculty and staff members at the distance sites. Reliance on distance education programs has raised legitAmerican Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 2004; 68 (3) Article 65.