Abstract:

Despite repeated didactic exposure to the principles underlying parenteral preparations and other relevant theoretical studies concerning their manufacturing and quality control, a solid and comprehensive understanding and translation of theoretical studies into real-life implementation are still challenging to many pharmacy & pharmaceutical sciences students planning to specialize in industrial manufacturing. Today's pharmacy graduates must continuously build and reconstruct their expertise and apply their theoretical knowledge in actual work. Therefore, organizing an industrial field trip is mainly aimed at helping students establish real-life experience about implementing what they learned in class and research laboratories in real life and achieve the learning outcomes on the manufacturing process of parenteral preparations. A questionnaire-based cross-sectional analysis of the trip's impact on students' theoretical understanding and overall learning outcomes of the pharmaceutics II course was designed and evaluated. Anonymous responses from second-year pharmacy students at Qatar University attending pharmaceutics II course were obtained using an online designed survey. The questionnaire was distributed as part of a post-trip experience evaluation and was meant to improve the students' experience through the years. The students who were not successful in attending the industrial trip were excluded from the study, and only the responses from participants who met the study criteria were considered. Since the study population was small, a whole population sampling was utilized. The response rate from the attending students was 100%. The questionnaire aimed to investigate the trip's impact on boosting students' understanding of specific critical principles covered in class. Most students agreed on the good organization and structure of the industrial trip. More importantly, as high as 96% of the students believed the trip had allowed them to complement what they learned in class and laboratory. Overall, 96% of the students found the industrial trip well organized, informative, and played an important role in facilitating their comprehension and understanding of some of the complex principles concerning parenteral preparations' manufacturing. In conclusion, an industrial trip to a pharmaceutical manufacturing company was found organized, informative and enhanced the students' knowledge of how pharmaceutics and drug manufacturing is practiced in real life.

Keywords:

Pharmacy, parenteral preparations, practical knowledge, industrial trip, pharmaceutics course, quality control.