Overview
Karnali Academy of Health Sciences (KAHS) offers 4 years of Full-Time Bachelor in Pharmacy (B-Pharm) Programs. Bachelor of Pharmacy (B. Pharma) is a four-year undergraduate program designed to introduce students to the properties and impacts of allopathic and herbal pharmaceutical drugs. The program helps students in developing the skills essential to manufacture dosage forms and counsel patients about medication use.
In the developed part of the world, 97 % of pharmacists are working in the hospital and community settings. But our situation is different. The core pharmacy subjects include Pharmaceutics, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pharmacognosy, herbal medicine, herbal medicine technology, Pharmacology, Pharmacotherapeutics, Hospital Pharmacy, and Community Pharmacy.
Practice change of this magnitude requires appropriate changes in education. Over the past few decades, there have been significant advances in pharmacy education in many countries aimed at improving the standard of graduates and their ability to provide a wide range of innovative pharmaceutical dosage form manufacturing, quality control, and patient care services. Advances in pharmacy education have occurred in curriculum design and pedagogy that include student-oriented teaching methods that impart the skills to students. Now Nepal adopt the federal political governance system so, it is necessary that local graduates are focused on meeting basic local requirements for maintaining a quality medicine manufacturing, quality control, and supply chain that addresses patient needs. Providing pharmacists with advanced skills would enable them to fill a “needs gap” in all sectors of pharmacy practice to improve health care standards.
Competencies of B Pharm Graduates of Karnali Academy of Health Sciences (KAHS): Implementation of competency-based pharmacy education (CBPE) is a time-consuming, complicated process, which requires agreement on the tasks of a pharmacist, commitment, institutional stability, and a goal-directed developmental perspective of all stakeholders involved.
The design of a competency-based curriculum ideally follows a specific sequence from competencies to learning outcomes, to assessments, to teaching-learning activities.
We have to plan to produce a pharmacy graduate generalist with a balance between Karnali-specific skills as well as the potential for global mobility. This circumstance forced us to go ahead with a 5 years Bachelor of Pharmacy course in KAHS. As per FIP more than 95 % of pharmacists in the world are practicing in community pharmacy settings.
According to FIP, the core competencies of a pharmacist are:
- Pharmaceutical Public Health Competencies: Health promotion and Medicines information & advice,
- Pharmaceutical Care Competencies: Assessment of medicines, Compounding medicines, Dispensing, and Monitor medicines therapy.
- Organization and Management Competencies: Organizational structure, budgeting, Procurement, Supply chain and management, and human resource management.
- Professional/Personal Competencies: Communication skills, CPD, Professional and ethical practice, Quality Assurance, and Research in the workplace
The main job hub of pharmacists was the industrial sector till 2015, but employment in the hospital sector is growing gradually. The community sector is also emerging. So if we only follow the FIP competencies or the western model of pharmacy education only, it will not be practicable at present.
So we want to produce a pharmacist generalist (as in other universities in Nepal) with one added competency as “Pharmaceutical entrepreneurship, manufacturing and quality assurance of allopathic and herbal recourses as well as their finish formulations. Especially we want to groom KAHS graduates as an innovator that can take on the challenge of developing enterprise, and herbal formulations for the upliftment of the economic status of the people of Karnali.
General Educational Goals and Objectives of KAHS B Pharm Program:
The Bachelor of Pharmacy Degree offered by KAHS aims to:
- Produce graduates who are competent, skillful, resourceful, ethical, and professional.
- Cultivate leadership values and critical thinking in order to produce graduates who are self-reliant.
- Produce graduates who are caring, compassionate, and show respect and fairness to others
- Nurture graduates for life-long learning and who are adaptable to socioeconomic, health, and environmental changes.
How to achieve the Herbal medicine focus competency Concept of Pharmacy Graduates of Karnali Academy of Health Sciences? This curriculum aims to endorse the following subjects 20 credits for theory and 8 credits for practical.
