Josephine Maundu¹
Hayley Croft², Kirstie Galbraith³, Steven Walker³ and Peter Halstead¹
1 Australian Pharmacy Council
2 University of Newcastle
3 Monash University

Pharmacy education in Australia has embraced an outcome-based approach, evident through the integration of accreditation standards and a performance outcomes framework developed by the Australian Pharmacy Council (APC)(1). In response to the accreditation standards, education providers are required to use diverse, contemporary, and evidence-based assessment methods within academic, practical, and work- integrated learning (WIL) environments. This provides assurance that graduates, and prospective pharmacist registration applicants (pharmacy interns) have achieved the performance outcomes necessary to serve and safeguard the public. Addressing the need for comprehensive pharmacy intern assessments, the APC developed and introduced a suite of workplace-based assessment (WBA) tools in partnership with Intern Training Program (ITP) providers(2). These WBA tools support intern learning in the workplace, observation of intern performance and provision of structured feedback. Most training sites, including community and hospital pharmacies, are using WBA tools for the first time in 2023 across Australia. Further, a small-scale pilot of these tools was conducted in the context of WIL for pharmacy students in their later years of their undergraduate degree programs. This work explored the applicability of EPAs for supporting feedback and assessment of professional tasks related to medicine dispensing and patient counselling. 

Why is this topic important?
Competency-based education and the use of WBAs have been well established in medical training and expanding into other healthcare professions, including pharmacy(3). The advantage of WBA is that it enables the assessment of clinical reasoning, decision making, communication skills and professional judgement in real working environment. WBAs have been demonstrated to be a more effective evaluation of competency in comparison to traditional assessments such as written or oral examinations. We will share our learnings from the development and introduction of the WBA tools and describe challenges and enabling factors. 

Take home messages.
This is the first program to introduce and evaluate WBA in the pre-registration training of pharmacy graduates at a national level involving multiple sites in diverse settings in Australia. 

This is also informing strategies for WIL in pharmacy undergraduate programs. These lessons can inform other health professional training programs seeking to incorporate WBA. 

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