Monday Conference

Pharmacy Degree
In U.S., college students choose their undergraduate major and then decide along the way, or possibly even after finishing college, if they want to pursue a graduate degree.  In Taiwan, students who want to pursue a health professional degree ie medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, need to make that decision at the end of high school.  For medicine, instead of having 4 years of undergraduate studies and 4 years of medical school, it is all lumped into a 7-year program.  Pharmacy is a Bachelor's degree, and therefore, graduates can take the licensure exam right after completion of the 4-year program.  The graduates have the option of doing a Master's program for an additional 2 years, where there is a focus on clinical rotations.  At NTU, there is also a 6-year program (starting right after high school) which is the closest equivalent to the Pharm.D. program in the U.S.  It is currently the only one in the country. 

Informal Discussion
On Monday, 8/20, we were invited to attend what was referred to as an "Informal Discussion".  It was reminiscent of our Monday Conferences at UC Davis, where the students from their Master's program meet to go over patient cases.  The conference is faciliated by two faculty members from the school of pharmacy, one of which is a Pharm.D. graduate from Purdue who did 2 years of residency at the University of Michigan.  Every week, two students present patients and the facilitators ask questions or make teaching points out of the case discussions.  This conference started out with the previous week's presenters following up on questions they had to research.  The students for this week proceeded to present their cases.  Although the majority of the presentation was in Mandarin, many of the diagnoses and treatments were discussed using English terminology.  One thing I noticed about one of the patient cases, and in many other cases where patients have infections, is that they commonly switch antibiotics if the patient spikes a fever without having a target of therapy.  Although a switch in therapy may be warranted, in some cases, I've noticed the microorganism coverage of the new antibiotic is no better than the previous treatment.  It's something I will ask my preceptor about and look into more as I go through more patients.