Abstract
The white coat ceremony welcomed the inaugural class of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Waterloo.
The University of Waterloo (UW) has launched Canada's first new pharmacy program in more than 20 years and the only comprehensive co-op program for pharmacy in the country.
The first class of 92 students began their studies at the School of Pharmacy on January 7, 2008, at the university's new health sciences campus in downtown Kitchener. Their 4 years of study to achieve an Honours Bachelor of Pharmacy degree will include 16 months (4 semesters) of practical experience.
The last new pharmacy program created in Canada was in 1985, when Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland, founded its School of Pharmacy.
The UW program was modelled in part on the PharmD program at Northeastern University in Boston, the only other co-op pharmacy program in North America. Jake Thiessen, former professor and associate dean at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, is the director of both the new school and the UW health sciences campus. During the planning phase, he consulted faculty members and students at Northeastern.
“When I met students there, I asked them, ‘if you have one recommendation for me in starting up a new program, what would it be?’ And the students said, ‘do co-op’. “The other driver was the historically strong record of co-op education at the University of Waterloo,” Dr. Thiessen adds. “They were willing to venture out into health care and the pharmacy school is the first of those programs.”
The right time
Several factors combined to “make all of this work,” Dr. Thiessen says. “Obviously, there was need. There continues to be a shortage of pharmacists and the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities endorsed the establishment of a new pharmacy program for up to 120 students.”
At the same time, the City of Kitchener wanted to revitalize the downtown core and agreed to partner with the University, providing land and $30 million in capital to construct the building for the pharmacy school. Additional construction on the campus is underway to create a primary care clinic that will be part of a satellite of the McMaster University medical program in Hamilton.
The program is unique in several ways beyond its extensive co-op component, explains Dr. Thiessen: “We have set the highest bar for entrance requirements of any pharmacy program in Canada.” The students are required to have completed several university courses that are equivalent to at least 2 years of study. This will allow professional practice courses to begin in the first year of the program and will also create room for studies in such areas as business, health informatics, and patient safety.
Graduates will possess unique skills
Most of the students in the new program are from Ontario, but there are students from virtually every province. Forty percent of them already hold a degree. “One of our students has a PhD and 6 hold master's degrees,” Dr. Thiessen says. “This is a fairly mature group.”
Dr. Thiessen is confident that the graduates of the new UW School of Pharmacy “will have experience like no other graduates of pharmacy programs in the country.”
“These students are risk-takers and entrepreneurially minded. Many of them have international ambitions. They are keen to be leaders in therapeutic management but also interested in business and informatics. This program is going to turn out graduates that I think will catch the Canadian scene by storm and challenge the pharmacy world.”