Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience Evaluation Tool is New and Improved Starting May 2024
Pacific University School of Pharmacy Experiential Education team has been working with the Northwest Experiential Consortium to update the Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience (APPE) Evaluation tool. The consortium is made up of seven Schools and Colleges of Pharmacy including University of Washington, Washington State, Idaho State, University of Wyoming, Oregon State, and University of Montana. The consortium has used a shared APPE evaluation tool since 2009 with the last update performed in 2016. The finalized evaluation tool is now finalized and set to release for use for the next APPE academic year starting May 13, 2024.
The evaluation tool was updated with the help of feedback from over 150 different preceptors through survey and a focus group of over 20 preceptors who provided even more focused feedback on item and scale language, as well as applicability of questions to each practice area. This helped the consortium land on the language used for our assessment scales as well as our assessment items, hoping to better represent our form for appropriate use. Thank you to all of those who were involved in this critical feedback process!
The tool will use two main scales for evaluation. The first is an entrustment scale and is quite different than the scale used in our previous tool. This scale uses entrustment language asking the evaluator to evaluate specific activities and their level of trust for the learner to complete them. This type of scale is used for formative assessment, helping the learner to understand their main areas for growth within the specific practice setting. There are some specialized practice settings where we would expect that most learners in the APPE year would not reach a high level of entrustment on some of the entrustable activities, however, the feedback for growth overall is critical.
Items like communication and actions of professionalism, such as accountability that are not easily assessed using an entrustment scale, will continue to be assessed using a global assessment scale.
The end of the form will ask to assess their overall performance considering their performance in all categories and trends in the entrustable activities areas. Since the rotations are pass/fail, this part of the tool will be used to determine the final outcome of the experience.
We are currently working with all other consortium schools on the education plan for preceptors on the use of this new tool and we will release upcoming communications to all preceptors for the next academic year by the end of April.
We look forward to how this tool will assist both preceptors and students in evaluation and learning!
— School of Pharmacy Experiential Team