Cultural sensitivity is threaded through course curriculum at School of Pharmacy
The University of Colorado Denver School of Pharmacy’s ongoing commitment to promoting and enhancing cultural diversity has culminated in a program whose focus is as diverse as the patients that students encounter in practice.
The Cultural Competency Education Program integrates cultural competency and sensitivity throughout the curriculum to assure that graduates enter practice able to provide competent care to an increasingly diverse population of patients.
“ As a pharmacist, you don’t know who is going to walk through the door asking for your help,” said Ralph Altiere, PhD, associate dean for academic affairs at the School of Pharmacy. “A student who graduates from our school must be a part of the solution, to actively address health disparities and provide services where they’re needed.”
In didactic courses, cultural competency education focuses on therapeutics issues, such as the differences among groups in prevalence of diseases and differences in response to specific medications. Groups are defined by age, gender, ethnicity and race.
In the Professional Skills Development courses, students learn skills associated with pharmacy practice. Two activities that incorporate cultural competency education are simulated patient encounters and case-based studies in which students must resolve cases and make recommendations on drug therapy for a variety of disease states and conditions.
Students work up cases from patient charts while taking into consideration such factors as insurance, financial constraints, relationships, mental history, chronic conditions and medications.
More cultural competency education occurs in active learning courses. Students provide patient counseling and clinical pharmacy services that focus on rural and underserved minority populations through programs at community health centers, health fairs and brown bag sessions.
“ We teach them to treat the whole patient, not just the medical condition,” said Connie Valdez, PharmD, MSEd, a Professional Skills Development course instructor.
“ Students must additionally look at whether medication is feasible, does it fit in with the patient’s culture, and can they afford it. A student told me she now looks at a patient as a person, not as chart or prescription. That, to me, is success.”
