Project Evaluation of Recruiting Pharmacy Descendant to Study in Faculty of Pharmacy

Legally, pharmacist is required to be on duty all the time of service. In Thailand, despite a number of government agendas have been issued, there are still a problem of actual working phamacist in a phamacy shop. In 2006, the Food and Drug Administration, Ministry of Public Health has implemented a project entitled uRecruiting pharmacy descendant to study in faculty of pharmacyu. This project was a special tract to recruit pharmacy descendant into pharmacy degree course in universities. The student and the pharmacy owner had to sign a contract committing that student had to come to work in a pharmacy after graduation. This was a new project which should be evaluated. The evaluation was conducted by CIPP model (Context › Input › Process › Product Model). Data was collected by interviewing 7 relevant administers in Faculty of pharmacies, 10 committee members of Drug store club (Thailand), together with document searching and sending questionnaires sent to projectus students. The evaluation was performed during November 2008 › June 2009, four years after the initiation of the project, Context evaluation revealed that the project was launched on the hypothesis that signing contract to commit students to work in the parentus shop would be effective. It was also found that the university could run the project without interfering with the normal student admission into university. For input evaluation; the project involved several parties which all of them were happy and got benefit from the project. The criteria of recruiting students into the project were a little bit different between universities, but they did not affect the goal of the project. Process evaluation revealed that all universities used admission paper examination and/or admission interview to recruit the students. But the competition was within group of pharmacy descendant only. The projectus students were put into the same class as regular pharmacy students. Product evaluation showed no difference in learning achievement between the projectus students and regular students. However, the actual number of students was far below the aimed figure of the project. This under targeted number was important as it may reflect to the failure of the projectus goal. Having performed this interim project evaluation, a few suggestions were made i.e. only pharmacy descendant should be eligible to the project, right attitude and correct understanding to the projectus goal should be emphasized to the public and special course to prepare students to be community pharmacist should be considered.