Leadership Development APPE for Fourth-Year Pharmacy Students

Abstract

Objective. Describe development and current structure of an advanced pharmacy practice experience (APPE) in leadership.

Methods. Our leadership APPE evolved from mostly content-oriented delivery to an experiential offering by identifying and implementing rich practical leadership experiences over time. After five years of developing and refining the APPE, faculty coordinators sought student feedback on the current leadership rotation beyond using the standardized APPE evaluation students complete at the end of rotations. Data were analyzed and reported as means of agreement for quantitative items, and open-ended responses were analyzed by latent thematic analysis.

Results. Current APPE topics include PhotoVoice, Power of Full Engagement, What’s Your Passion, Transformational Leadership, Speech Acts, a Mindfulness Retreat, PeoplePack Dynamics, a rowing experience at an Olympic training facility, and more. Overall, students positively agreed with all evaluation items. Items with highest mean agreement included: early course concepts were reinforced in the rotation; relevance of the rotation to one’s career; rotation objectives facilitated learning; and a variety of teaching methods helped in applying knowledge to future practice. Analysis of comments regarding the rotation overall identified three main themes of Gratitude, Development, and More Connection, along with various subthemes.

Conclusion. An APPE elective with a primary purpose of leadership training and development can be created for experiential learning. We present a summary of the history, development, and current practices of a leadership APPE that can serve as an example for institutions in the implementation of leadership offerings for student pharmacists.