Educating Pharmacy Students on Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics

Julie Johnson, Dean of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, on standards of education for pharmacy students around pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics. This video was filmed at the 2019 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Annual Meeting in Chicago.

Julie Johnson, PharmD: Pharmacogenetics and genomics has been in the ACPE standards since 2007, so we're in the third set of standards that have that listed. But importantly, the most recent set of standards, the 2016 standards, moved it from kind of a basic science knowledge set to the clinical sciences and clinical practice piece. So I think this is where we see that schools really have, in many cases, a need to kind of think differently. In many cases, they had a basic scientist who was assigned to teach that content, and for the basic fundamentals that's still fine. But it needs to be the basic fundamentals plus 'how do you use that information clinically,' so that part of it really needs to be taught by clinical faculty, clinician faculty. And not every program necessarily has people who are experts in that space, and so they're probably going to have to figure out a way to assign 1 or 2 people to work to become the experts. They may not be able to hire experts, but helping equip their faculty, their clinical faculty, to be able to deliver that content in collaboration with that basic science faculty, who's probably been teaching some of the content for a decade or so.