Digital Health with educational approaches is the theme in the FIP report, which promotes Digital Health education to healthcare professionals in training, especially pharmacists.
The International Federation of Pharmacists (FIP), for its acronym in English, presented the FIP report Digital Health in pharmacy education, for the development of a digitally enabled pharmacy workforce. “Digital health technologies save lives, improve health and wellbeing, increase access to care and lead to effective healthsystems and healthier populations,” FIP begins in the executive summary of the document.
FIP believes that Digital Health should be a health policy priority and urges a focus on the adoption of such solutions to improve digital literacy standards. Clinical practice has achieved a remarkable evolution in recent years, in terms of prevention, diagnosis, monitoring and disease management, achievements that would not have been possible without the application of health technologies.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the impact of Digital Health and digital transformation, which has had a significant impact on healthcare services. For example, policies in favor of solutions such as telemedicine and telehealth are increasingly recurrent in various regions of the world.
FIP considers it an opportunity to include digital health in education in this era of digital transformation and migration. “Universities and education providers have been providing digital health education with most of the programmes being focused on certificate provision models”, the FIP experts point out in the document. However, they consider that there is a deficit in education and training in digital health, and emphasize the lack of a national approach or a professionally-driven initiative to achieve a real boost for Digital Health in education..
FIP's main concern lies in the need for Digital Health strategies in pharmacy education. “Pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences education must be needsbased to meet existing and emerging requirements in digital health”, they explain. They suggest that Digital Health innovations should occur by forming an interdisciplinary group that includes experts from the health sector for the development of a Digital Health education framework. In addition, they mention that studies on Digital Health in the pharmaceutical sector only include universities from a few countries, which does not include the true global picture.
The solutions proposed by FIP is to integrate undergraduate degrees specialized in eHealth services, so that students from their early career can add new eHealth/Digital Health/mHealth skills to their curriculum. “Integrating digital health in undergraduate pharmacy initial education is a critical strategy to increase digital health competencies overall as it is likely to promote greater awareness and life-long learners of digital health. There was a greater likelihood of receiving digital health education as part of continuous professional development if pharmacists had previously received digital health education in school”.
“We believe this report will catalyse further research and developments in the area to increase the adoption of digital health by the pharmaceutical workforce,” they point out to conclude the executive summary of the document. The complete document is available at the following link: https://www.fip.org/file/4921
INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF PHARMACISTS
