AccessPharmacy helps meet demands of pharmacy education

In five years, nearly 300,000 practicing pharmacists will be needed nationwide to serve an aging population, a 30 percent increase compared with 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

To help meet this growing need for pharmacists, McGraw-Hill Professional, a leading global provider of information resources for the scientific and medical communities, has launched AccessPharmacy, an online content solution, which is designed to keep pace with the changing demands of pharmacy education.

The Web-based resource uses a unique curricular-based approach modeled after the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) national guidelines. AccessPharmacy leverages the content of the industry's most trusted pharmacy resources, including Pharmacotherapy: A Pathophysiologic Approach, 6th edition; Pharmacotherapy Casebook, 6th edition; Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, 11th edition; Basic & Clinical Pharmacology, 9th edition, and Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 16th edition. In addition, the editors of Goodman & Gilman's will provide monthly updates to AccessPharmacy.

To provide pharmacy students with an interactive, practical and real-world learning experience, AccessPharmacy offers case-based learning through more than 150 drug therapy cases with related Q&As as well as care plans that students can complete and submit to faculty for review and critique. With this new McGraw-Hill reference, students, depending on their specific learning needs, can select from more than 500 core curriculum topics, browse by organ system, review textbooks online or search the entire Web-based resource.

"Pharmacy education is an extremely fast-growing and ever-changing study," said Scott Grillo, vice president of Digital Content Development in McGraw- Hill Professional's Digital Group. "AccessPharmacy provides a comprehensive tool for these students to access the tremendous amount of learning needed to enter this challenging and critical field. AccessPharmacy delivers the most up-to-date information in a variety of formats and contexts the students will see in actual practice."

A self-assessment tool with nearly 4,000 Q&A including dedicated North American Pharmacist Licensure Examination (NAPLEX) review provides students with opportunities to practice the increasingly challenging certification exams. The program keeps a personalized record of the number of practice tests taken and recent scores.

A fully integrated drug database, in both English and Spanish, allows quick access to complete chemical structure and dosing information, adverse reactions, indications, contraindications and full-color photos of all formulations. "Drug of the Week" quizzes test the student's ability to visually identify the top 200 brand-name drugs.

AccessPharmacy is regularly reviewed by an editorial board of leading PharmD's and updated with daily news feeds from the Pharmacotherapy News Network (PNN). New virtual cases and pharmacologic animations that detail drug interactions on a molecular level are added quarterly.