Pharmaceutical Education And Its Impact On The Post COVID World!

The ongoing pandemic is drastically shaping the future of health care from what we knew it to be, since it has already infused disruptions in most aspects of life including health-associated education. A major change that was forced upon the educationists & students, to prevent the spread of this pandemic, was the closing of academic institutions. Further we transferred the educational activities to unfamiliar “online” learning virtual platforms with a major and rapid restructuring of curricula, course delivery, and assessments. The net impact on pharmacy education is more pronounced because of its peculiarities involving clinical rotation, laboratory experiences, internships, clinical clerkship, observing and assisting relevant Clinicians etc. Pharmacy schools and colleges worldwide have started to figure out solutions for such challenges to ensure sustainable practice-oriented education.

The national pharmacy education regulator, Pharmacy Council of India is of the view that the post-COVID-19 pandemic period will be highly competitive for the pharmacy education sector in the world in general and in India in particular. True to this, we can visibly experience that time management and opportunity for self-learning are the best positive outcomes among faculty and students; a combination of online and face-to-face learning methods (blended mode) is now accepted to be better after the pandemic. More opportunities presented due to the pandemic that could positively impact pharmacy education are the introduction of tele-pharmacy, disaster preparedness, enhanced readiness to adapt to changing environment that strengthens student resilience.  The opportunity to innovate through tech, a desire to improve quality of care and make systems more efficient and an ambition to solve real-world problems is significantly high now than ever before. Further, the pharmaceutical sector is now growing at an expedited rate in India and abroad offering promising and enriching careers in pharmaceutical sector at the global level in the Post COVID-19 scenario.

About the Author:

Dr. Maneesh Paul. S or fondly called CD Sir at Acharya is the Campus Director enabling the process of Acharya becoming a research-based campus of academic excellence.

Maneesh Paul, the co-inventor of Enmetazobactam, is a clinical microbiologist who pursued basic and applied research discovering novel anti-infectives and characterizing several microbial genes and proteins. He has translated scientific accomplishments and leadership through 40 patent applications and 33 peer-reviewed publications.

As a postdoctoral fellow, he further trained in infectious diseases, specifically in molecular mechanisms of neonatal microbial meningitis at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the USA, and the role of A. actinomycetemcomitans in atherosclerosis at Umeå University, Sweden. He was the ORISE Fellow at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), USFDA, USA researching on reverse vaccinology of N. Meningitidis. He led New Drug Discovery at Orchid Pharma, Chennai.

He is on Antimicrobial Resistance Committee of Infectious Diseases Society of America, USA, and featured as Subject Matter expert at REVIVE-GARDP (of WHO & DNDi).

Maneesh received a Master’s in microbiology from Kasturba Medical College-MAHE and undertook doctoral research from Gulbarga University supported by Jean-Claire Lee, Harvard Medical School, USA.