Innovating Pharmacy Curriculum through Backward Design

This paper is a description of a curriculum development process used by a pharmacy school to redesign its Doctor of Pharmacy program to meet the changing demands of the profession and to comply with new accreditation standards. The goal of the redesigned curriculum was to produce “practice-ready” graduates who were able to enter the profession with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in an increasingly team-based, complex, diverse, and evolving field. The school deviated from stand-alone courses with a discipline specific focus to a series of integrated learning experiences. The Backward Design framework was utilized to organize the curriculum revision efforts. The school began by outlining a vision of the profession of pharmacy for the coming decade. Based on that vision, the school determined 10 broad domains in which an entry-level pharmacist should be competent. Each domain was broken down into ability-based outcomes and further into competencies. The competencies were prioritized, mapped, and spiraled across the learning experiences within the curriculum combining the skills and knowledge from multiple areas of pharmacy education, content areas, and practice settings.