Cultivating expert thinking skills for experiential pharmacy trainees

The Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) standards state that curricula should develop “practice-ready” graduates, where “practice-ready” is defined as the ability to retain, recall, build upon, and apply comprehensive knowledge to deliver quality patient care in a variety of practice settings.1 The standards of practice for clinical pharmacists identify skills in clinical problem-solving, judgment, and decision-making as core competencies.2 Despite the accreditation standard being to develop practice-ready graduates, pharmacists struggle with clinical decision-making in practice.3 Factors that influence pharmacists’ capabilities in making clinical decisions include skills in contextualizing data, clinical reasoning, and clinical judgment.4 A gap has been identified between the desired pharmacy graduate and the practicing pharmacist, highlighting a need for improved education in this area of expected competence. Teaching strategies can be used in the didactic and experiential settings to target the cognitive and contextual factors associated with clinical reasoning.5 This can be done by explicating and reflecting on clinical reasoning with transparent cognitive processes.6