Pharmacy Graduates’ Experiences and Perception on Psychiatry Pharmacy Experiential Learning or Clerkship in Selangor, Malaysia

Pharmacists are healthcare professionals responsible for providing patient care and ensure optimal medication therapy outcomes. As medication therapy gets more complex, more specialized knowledge and skill are needed to ensure optimal result. Hence, more proficient and experienced pharmacists are required to cater the high demand in current pharmacy practice that is moving towards specialization. However, in order to ensure pharmacists produced fit those requirements, the pharmacy education needs to ensure that students have adequate exposures to each spe?cialized area during their clinical years. These exposures will be very useful and beneficial for the students when they enter the real clinical setting. This study aims to identify UOC pharmacy graduates’ experiences and perception in psychiatry pharmacy experiential learning or clerkship. A cross-sectional online survey was carried out among UOC pharmacy graduates and was distributed to 136 alumni through email address and social media platforms. The ques?tionnaire consist of 3 sections and each question was scored using 5 point Likert scales which constitute from strongly disagree to strongly agree. A total 73 alumni participated in this study, giving a response rate of 53.7%. Ma?jority of the respondents were female, Malay and graduated in 2012 and 2013. Mean score of experiences and per?ception were compared between various groups of demographic and it was found that there were no statistically significant differences between genders, ethnicities and year of BPharm (Hons.) completion (p > 0.05). A correlation between mean experiences and perception score was also assessed and it was found that there was statistically sig?nificant strong positive correlation between mean experiences and perception score (p < 0.001). Overall, majority of alumni have had a good experiences during the clerkship and almost all of them perceived it positively. In conclusion, the findings from this study only give an initial overview of psychiatry clerkship in pharmacy school. A similar re?search in other pharmacy schools is required to establish the need and importance of psychiatry clerkship for un?dergraduate pharmacy students.