Education

Loren Bonner

At a June 2024 meeting, the board of directors for the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) approved new accreditation standards for the PharmD degree. All ACPE-accredited programs must be in compliance with the new standards by the effective date of July 1, 2025.

Jan Engle, PharmD, executive director of ACPE, sat down with Pharmacy Today Pharmacy Today to talk about ACPE’s revision to the accreditation standards—currently known as Standards 2016 and soon to be Standards 2025.

Accreditation of a professional degree program leading to the PharmD degree indicates that the program has been evaluated to meet established qualifications and educational standards.

Currently, all PharmD programs in the United States are evaluated based on Standards 2016. As of July 1, 2025, Standards 2025 will be in effect and programs will be evaluated based on these standards.

What’s the purpose of accreditation standards?

JE: Accreditation is an important aspect of ensuring quality in pharmacy education in the United States and abroad. Ac-creditation is public recognition that a program has in place the necessary curriculum, student support, instructional sup-port, qualified faculty, and physical facilities among other services to achieve the educational goals of the program.

In the United States, the PharmD degree program must be accredited by ACPE in order for graduates to be eligible to take the pharmacy licensure exam, or NAPLEX.

In the application of the standards, consistency in how a standard is met is not required beyond meeting the minimum expectations. Many pharmacy programs exceed one or more of the standards.

Why are the 2016 standards being updated?

JE: ACPE is recognized by the United States Department of Education (USDE). As such, ACPE must follow USDE re-quirements regarding revision of the accreditation standards, which must occur on a regular basis.

Accreditation standards and guidelines for the professional program in pharmacy (Standards 2000) led to the PharmD degree as the sole entry degree, which became effective July 1, 2000. The customary 8-year review cycle includes an onsite evaluation visit conducted by a team of educators and practitioners.

Some of the USDE requirements include:

• Standards used to evaluate programs must be adequate, relevant, and appropriate to the education involved.
• Standards must be rigorous measurements of the quality of the educational program and institution.
• As occupations evolve through knowledge and technology, the measurements of quality (standards) must also evolve.

The accreditor must be able to show that rigorous methodology was used to revise the standards and input was included from the profession and others.

Before finalizing any changes to its standards, the accreditor must provide notice to all of its relevant constituencies—and other parties who have made their interest known to the accreditor—of the changes the accreditor proposes to make; give the constituencies and other interested parties adequate opportunity to comment on the proposed changes; and take into account any comments on the proposed changes submitted timely by the relevant constituencies and by other interested parties and establish a period of roll-out, adoption, and adjustment to the new standards.

What changes or necessary improvements are being made to the standards?

JE: Our goal was to simplify the standards, reduce redundancies, and update them to reflect current and future practice needs so that student pharmacists would be practice-ready and team-ready when they graduate.

For example, the number of standards was reduced from the 25 standards in Standards 2016 to seven standards in Standards 2025. The guidance document statements from Standards 2016 have been incorporated into the Standards 2025 document to provide necessary information in one document rather than two separate documents.

References have been made to the annual monitoring policies in Standards 2025 that are also found in the policies and procedures manual.

Additional changes that were made to the standards  are available at www.acpe-accredit.org/pdf/Standard2025AACPPoster.pdf.

What was the timeline for the process like?

JE: We started the process in January 2021 and finished in June 2024, so the process took several years and was designed to obtain as much feedback as possible from pharmacists, student pharmacists, faculty, the public, etc.

We had two major comment periods where we solicited feedback. A survey was posted on the ACPE website that allowed for feedback, an email address was available to provide comments, and ACPE held multiple town halls to obtain feedback on what needed to be changed in Standards 2016 and then feedback on the draft of Standards 2025.

Is there anything pharmacists can do in the next months to be involved or stay in the know about the update?JE:

JE: Standards 2025 are now final  and were approved by the ACPE board for dissemination on July 1, 2024. They do not go into effect until July 1, 2025. This allows 12 months between the release of the new standards and their implementation to give pharmacy pro-grams time to review them and make necessary changes in their program.

Pharmacists can keep up to date by reading the “ACPE Update Newsletter,” (available at www.acpeaccredit.org/communications/#tab-Newsletters) which is published twice yearly in the fall and spring.

Anything else you’d like to add for pharmacists pertaining to the standards?

JE: While the standards are critical to the accreditation process, they are not the only metrics that are used to evaluate a program. All pharmacy programs in the United States are required by ACPE to undergo annual monitoring in addition to comprehensive and focused site visits and interim reports.

Each year, ACPE monitors the following parameters for all accredited PharmD programs:

• Changes and trends in NAPLEX outcomes
• Changes and trends in enrollment
• On-time graduation rates
• Financial resources
• Job placement/gainful employment (USDE expectation)

The board may review data relating to other programmatic outcomes, such as the performance of graduates on other standardized examinations including the Multistate Pharmacy Jurisprudence Examination (MPJE), to monitor changes and trends at colleges and schools. ■