Availability and Perceived Value of Bachelor of Science Programs in Pharmaceutical Marketing and Management in the United States

Several academic institutions across the United States offer Bachelor of Science degree programs in Pharmaceutical Marketing and/or Management. In general, these programs are designed to provide students with stronger foundations and a broader understanding of the business side of pharmacy. The purpose of this study was to explore the availability of the Bachelor of Science programs in pharmaceutical marketing and management in the United States. Internet search was conducted in order to collect information about the programs of interest. Results showed that a total of 8 schools and colleges offer the Bachelor of Science degree programs. The total number of credit hours for each program ranged from 122 to 130 All these schools/colleges were located in only 3 States, namely Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Massachusetts. Tuition and fees were markedly different across these programs. Additionally, salient differences between these programs were evident with regard to career paths expected for their graduates. These programs have gained more attention over the past few years as fewer numbers of pharmacists work in pharmaceutical sales jobs, leaving such jobs almost exclusively undertaken by graduates of Pharmaceutical Marketing and/or Management programs. In the future, we expect changes to take place in these programs’ curricula in order to equip students with more skills to assume certain jobs, such as insurance management, industry, or sales

Reading Strategies Used by Undergraduate University General Education Courses for Students in US and Qatar

This study assessed the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies of undergraduate university students in US and Qatar in reading academic materials. To achieve this, the participants were administered the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI). The inventory consists of three groups of reading strategies, namely global reading strategies, problem-solving strategies, and support reading strategies. It was given to 127 students (mean age = 21.03 years) in US and 134 students (mean age = 19.78 years) in Qatar enrolled in university general education courses. Descriptive statistics was applied in the data analysis. US and Qatar students were overall highly aware of metacognitive reading strategies, and the groups of strategies that were most used were problem-solving strategies, followed by global reading strategies, and then support reading strategies. The five strategies with the highest use were problem-solving strategies.Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library

Academic self-concept and its relationship to academic achievement among university students.

This research sought to study the academic self-concept and the relationship between the academic self-concept and students’ academic achievement among university Qatari students. Research of the academic self-concept is well documented in Western cultures, but the academic self-concept research is limited among Qatari students. A sample composed of 274 undergraduate university students was utilized in this study. Tools of data collection consisted of demographic characteristics such as gender and age; students’ cumulative Grade Point Average (GPA) as academic achievement; and the Academic Self-concept Questionnaire (Byrne, 1996) to measure the academic self-concept, which was composed of 40 items, distributed in 4 subscales namely Maths, Verbal, Academic, and Problem Solving. The result of the study revealed a significant but weak relationship between the academic self-concept and the academic achievement

Assessment of Texan pharmacists\u27 attitudes, behaviors, and preferences related to continuing pharmacy education

Background: Whether the available Continuing Education (CE) programs meet pharmacists’ continuously increasing needs and preferences is open to question. Objectives: to investigate pharmacists’ perceptions and attitudes concerning available CE programs, evaluate the pharmacists’ choices with regard to selecting among different CE programs, and investigate the factors that are associated with preference to utilize online CE programs. Method: A 17-question survey was developed and mailed to a random sample of 600 Texan pharmacists. In addition to collecting basic demographic information, the survey investigated pharmacists’ choices with regard to delivery and content of CE programs, motivations to participation in CE programs, and pharmacists’ preferences for future CE programs. Results: A total of 161 pharmacists completed the survey and mailed back their responses. Excluding the 75 undeliverable surveys, the response rate was 31%. Approximately 83% of respondents found that currently available CE programs met their educational needs. The most important factors influencing pharmacists’ choices with regard to CE programs were the scope programs, the location where programs are held, and the cost associated with enrolling in such programs. Online CE was the most preferred mode of CE among participants. The factors that were associated with pharmacists’ preferences to complete 50% or more of required CE through online programs were previous use of online CE programs, preference to limit the duration of CE programs to 1 or 2 hour-long, and perceived ability to find adequate CE programs among currently available CE programs. Conclusion: The findings suggest modalities for CE programs providers on how to improve CE programs in the future in order to meet the preferences of local pharmacists

Psychometrics of the SDQ-I for Palestinian Adolescent Students

The Self-description Questionnaire–I (SDQ–I) is a multidimensional instrument that measures eight self-concept facets hypothesized in Shavelson’s hierarchical model. This study investigated self-concept in a sample of Palestinian adolescent students using an Arabic version of the SDQ–I. Three-hundred sixty adolescents (163 girls and 197 boys) aged 13 to 16 years (M = 14.3, SD = .87) participated. The 72-item SDQ–I was administered in four Palestinian schools to assess the psychometric properties of the SDQ–I. This included the factor structure and the internal consistency reliability of the SDQ–I subscales and mean score responses of Palestinian self-concept. Factor analysis results, which accounted for the majority of the variance, supported an underlying general self-concept factor structure that demonstrated the eight factors that the SDQ–I is designed to measure. This is consistent with previous studies in similar age groups and the SDQ– I reliabilities were similar to those reported in the literature. Students perceived total self-concept positively (mean = 3.71). Three facets of self-concept (parent relations, reading, and general self-concept) indicated high positive selfconcept. Correlations among the different dimensions were consistent with the hierarchical structure in Shavelson’s model. Overall, the findings provided compelling support for Shavelson’s model, and the structure validity of Western self-concept measure. Interpretations were provided for the discrepancies regarding the Palestinian-Arab culture

Context-Free Path Queries on RDF Graphs

Navigational graph queries are an important class of queries that canextract implicit binary relations over the nodes of input graphs. Most of the navigational query languages used in the RDF community, e.g. property paths in W3C SPARQL 1.1 and nested regular expressions in nSPARQL, are based on the regular expressions. It is known that regular expressions have limited expressivity; for instance, some natural queries, like same generation-queries, are not expressible with regular expressions. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we present cfSPARQL, an extension of SPARQL query language equipped with context-free grammars. The cfSPARQL language is strictly more expressive than property paths and nested expressions. The additional expressivity can be used for modelling graph similarities, graph summarization and ontology alignment. Despite the increasing expressivity, we show that cfSPARQL still enjoys a low computational complexity and can be evaluated efficiently.Comment: 25 page

Workload Perceptions of Pharmacists: Part of Changing a National Trend

Background: A National Pharmacist Workforce Survey (NPW) survey is being conducted in the US every five years. The 2009- NPW project surveyed 1,391 participants, of which only 12 participants were from West Virginia. Therefore, such a small representation of West Virginian pharmacists may question the validity of extrapolating the results of the 2009 NPW survey to pharmacists in this state. As a result, a separate survey was needed to answer the questions about the perceived workload, work characteristics, and demographics for West Virginian pharmacists. Objectives: The primary objective of this investigation was to identify the pharmacists’ perceptions of workload in West Virginia and compare with the 2009 NPW survey. Materials and Methods: A group of pharmacists in West Virginia were surveyed for the perceptions of current workload, the changes of workload over the past year, the impact of workload on personnel satisfaction, and the quality of providing pharmaceutical services. All licensed pharmacists in West Virginia as of 2011 (adjusted to the total of 1970 individuals) were contacted up to three times. Pharmacists’ perceptions were measured using several items adopted from the 2009-NPW survey. Results: A total of 596 responses were received, yielding an adjusted response rate of 30%. The majority of West Virginia pharmacists believed that the current assigned workload was either high or excessively high. This perception follows the trend of the 2009 national manpower study that reported an increase of 14% (between 2004 and 2009) of pharmacists\u27 workload indicating the above fact. Similarly, nearly 61% of pharmacists believed that the workload has either increased or greatly increased over the past year. West Virginia pharmacists were more concerned about their job security, than those were sampled in the 2009 national manpower study. The West Virginia pharmacists perceive their workload to negatively impact the time they spend with patients, the quality of care provided to patients, and their ability to resolve and prevent drug related problems. These negative points on the patient care perception are found to be more pronounced in the current study on the West Virginia pharmacists than it was reported previously in the 2009 national manpower study. Conclusions: Although there does not seem to be a serious shortage of pharmacists in West Virginia at the present time, pharmacists reported that there are currently more patient care associated tasks need to be completed with the same amount of staffing levels

Vertical gingival display changes associated with upper premolars extraction orthodontic treatment : a prospective clinical trial

Extraction of upper bicuspids have been anecdotally blamed to increase the vertical gingival display (VGD) anteriorly. However, the extraction may be needed in some cases in order to correct the underlying orthodontic problem. Objectives: To investigate and compare vertical gingival display (VGD) changes associated with upper (first vs second) premolars extraction during orthodontic treatment. Design: A prospective clinical trial. Setting: Postgraduate dental teaching clinics at Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST). Sample population: Sixty orthodontic patients were included in the study. They were treated with upper first or second premolars extraction according to the underlying problem and the individualized treatment plan of each patient. Records (radiographs, study casts and clinical photographs) were taken for all subjects pre- and post- orthodontic treatment. Outcome measures: Pre- and post-treatment VGD, lip length in static and dynamic positions and the amount of upper teeth retractions were recorded. The paired and the independent t- test were used to detect differences within/between groups. Factors affecting VGD were investigated using backward stepwise linear regression analysis. In both static and dynamic captures, VGD increased after orthodontic treatment in both premolars extraction groups. Pre- and post-treatment variables differed significantly in groups 1 and 2. VGD changes were similar in both treatment groups. A significant association was found between VGD change during orthodontic treatment and upper canine retraction (P<0.001), pre-treatment ANB angle (P<0.01) and upper incisor retraction(P<0.05). The amount of anterior VGD increases after upper premolars extraction. The increase in VGD after first and second premolars extractions was comparable. The increase in VGD after orthodontic treatment is associated with the amount of canine retraction, pre-treatment ANB and the amount of incisor retraction

Reliability assessment of a peer evaluation instrument in a team-based learning course

Objective: To evaluate the reliability of a peer evaluation instrument in a longitudinal team-based learning setting. Methods: Student pharmacists were instructed to evaluate the contributions of their peers. Evaluations were analyzed for the variance of the scores by identifying low, medium, and high scores. Agreement between performance ratings within each group of students was assessed via intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). Results: We found little variation in the standard deviation (SD) based on the score means among the high, medium, and low scores within each group. The lack of variation in SD of results between groups suggests that the peer evaluation instrument produces precise results. The ICC showed strong concordance among raters. Conclusions: Findings suggest that our student peer evaluation instrument provides a reliable method for peer assessment in team-based learning settings

Co-administration of Vitamins E and C protects against stress-induced hepatorenal oxidative damage and effectively improves lipid profile at both low and high altitude

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of co- administration of vitamins E and C on exhaustive exercise induced-stress in regards to hepatorenal function in rats native to low altitude (LA) and high altitude (HA). In both LA and HA areas, native wistar rats of each area were divided into three groups of 6 rats each, which include stress-free control, forced swimming-induced experimental stress and experimental stress plus vitamins E and C treatment. Lipid profile and Liver and kidney functions were assessed in both groups. HA and LA rats exhibit similar baseline levels of liver and kidney function as well as lipid metabolism profiles. However, HA rats showed decreased levels of antioxidant markers with an increased level of lipid peroxidation. Exhaustive swimming exercise induced a significant increase in the liver and kidney function of rats at both altitudes accompanied with a decrease in antioxidants levels. However, the magnitude of change observed in HA rats was more profound. Also at LA, forced swimming exercise resulted in a significant increase in serum total cholesterol (TChol), triacylglycerides (TAG) and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL). However, in HA rats, forced swimming exercise caused a significant decrease in serum TChol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL), except for HDL levels which were significantly elevated. Pre- and co-administration of vitamins E and C counteracted the induction of liver and/or kidney function by exhaustive exercise, and lowered TChol and LDL levels in rats at either altitude. In conclusion, at native high altitude: kidney and liver function essentially remained stable; response to stress included more profound oxidative damage to liver and kidney tissues as well as augmented deterioration in lipid metabolism compared to low altitude; and combined administration of vitamins E and C protected against observed oxidative stress damage to liver and kidney tissues and preserved lipid metabolism. At low altitude, combined administration of vitamin E and C protected against stress-induced oxidative damage to the liver and kidney and did preserve normal lipid metabolism, except for HDL. These novel findings reveal the pathophysiological changes in the liver function, kidney function and lipid metabolism occurring at high altitude specifically under stress, and demonstrate the efficacy of combined supplementation of vitamins E and C to normalize these changes.Key words: Exercise, oxidative stress, vitamin E, vitamin C, altitude, rats