Study of UiTM Faculty of Pharmacy students performance in the community pharmacy attachment program and comparison between two batches / Murni Mohamed Ariffin

The four weeks Community Pharmacy Attachment Program for the third year undergraduate students of Bachelor of Pharmacy (Hons.) was organized to provide an early exposure for the students to acquire related technical and relevant pharmacy skills for the practice of community pharmacy. The objectives of this study were to 1) evaluate the students overall performance in this Community Pharmacy Attachment program, 2) determine the association between the three main attributes, 3) compare their performance scores with the earlier batch of students in year 2012, and 4) evaluate the perception of different races of preceptors towards UiTM students. The Performance Assessment Guide form contains fifteen major attributes for the students to be assessed by the pharmacist-in-charge in their respective training locations. The responses were scored from 1 to 5 (1 = poor, 2 = fair, 3 = good, 4 = very good, 5 = excellent). On average, the students were overall considered to be very good with the mean score of 4.00 in the majority of the criteria assessed. The association between the three main attributes; skill and knowledge, professionalism, work performance and attitude also showed that there were · significance association between each of the attributes (p < 0.05). The average scores were also increased by 5% in 2013 compared with 2012. The perceptions of different races of preceptors also showed that most of them considered the pharmacy students from UiTM to be very good as most of them evaluate UiTM at level of very good.