Two Basic Pharmacy Courses with Strong Experimental (Laboratory) Components
Professor Boka W. Hadzija Ph.D.Associate Professor Robert P. Shrewsbury Ph.D.
pages: 41 - 50
- DOI: 10.1300/J060v05n04_05
- Version of record first published: 13May1997
Abstract:
In the School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, two required basic pharmaceutics courses are taught in the first professional year. Each three-credit course has a separate one-credit laboratory component that has experiments to help illustrate the theoretical concepts presented in the lectures. These lab exercises were generally qualitative in nature and contained no quality-control assessment evaluation of extemporaneously compounded prescriptions. The redesign of these courses and their laboratory components was initiated in the 1994–95 academic year. This article describes the current status of one of the courses (Phar 61) and gives an example of one of the redesigned laboratory exercises (capsules). In this example, students formulate capsules and learn the quality assessment aspects of capsules, inspect their visual appearance, test for weight variation, and test for content uniformity. In data collected in the spring 1996 semester, more variability occurred in the content uniformity measurements than in weight variation. Since the prescription required the students to make a trituration, it is suggested that making the trituration a homogeneous mixture is the reason for more variability in the content uniformity.