(162) Incorporating Spiritual Considerations into Patient Care through Diverse Instructional Techniques

Objective : Assess first-year pharmacy students’ grades and perceptions on the role of spirituality in pharmacy practice.

Methods: Students viewed six, 17-minute pre-class videos on general spirituality and five major religions in the United States. These videos focused on medication considerations for patient care and were taught by pharmacists practicing that spirituality. Students attended a 20-minute in-class lecture and counseled two simulated patients during a 4-hour practicum integrating these concepts, utilizing a standardized grading rubric. Student perception was assessed using a 13-question survey, including a 6-point Likert Scale and 2 open-ended responses. The survey was analyzed using a retrospective post design, pre to post differences compared using t-tests, and effective size calculated using Cohen’s d.

Results: All students (n=125) completed the counseling session, and 113 students completed the survey. The mean counseling session grade was 94.78%. All survey responses indicated a statistically significant increase (p <.01) post-practicum. Questions centered around empathetic spiritual counseling perspectives had the greatest change (medium effect), followed by multicultural self-efficacy (small effect) and religious/spiritual openness (small effect). Students agreed the activity was valuable (mean=5.21), prepared them as a pharmacist (mean=5.48), and they valued hearing authentic experiences (mean=5.40). Common open-ended response themes included individualizing care by inquiring about spirituality, respect for others’ beliefs, and learning about spirituality/culture.

Conclusions: Students performed well on counseling exercises and understood the importance of learning about spirituality via diverse approaches. Students demonstrated improvement in empathy surrounding spirituality considerations in patient care and found the information applicable to future practice.