Pharmacy school curriculum

Pharmacists are medication experts. Their expertise involves both the science of medicine and the clinical practice of medicine. Concordia University Wisconsin’s curriculum provides an excellent framework for success in both aspects.

Pharmacy students participating during a class lecture.

Biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences

Your successful development as a pharmacist starts with a strong foundation in biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences. Patients require a pharmacist with in-depth, practical knowledge of the mechanisms behind life-changing medications. Pharmacists must communicate the precise nature of drug interactions, the advantages and disadvantages of drug delivery methods, and therapeutic alternatives to both patients and other healthcare providers.

Our biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences curriculum at Concordia University Wisconsin can be described in the following domains:

Foundational biomedical sciences

Pharmacy Anatomy and Physiology, Pharmacy Biochemistry, and Pharmacy Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Biology Serve as the cornerstone of the curriculum. These courses are tailored specifically to future pharmacists and provide the knowledge you’ll need to be successful later in the curriculum and as a pharmacy professional.

Drug delivery and drug action

Drug delivery focuses on how drugs get into the body, how the body alters those drugs, and how the drugs are eventually eliminated from the body. Drug action focuses on what the drugs do in the body after they are administered and before they’re eliminated from the body.

The drug delivery and drug action domains are critical areas of emphasis for pharmacists, setting our professionals apart from others as medication experts. The three-semester Pharmaceutics course series and three-semester Pharmacology course series provide knowledge and skills that transition the student from basic molecular and cellular processes to focusing on drugs’ abilities to alter these molecular and cellular processes. This fundamental knowledge is essential for identifying therapeutic alternatives during subsequent therapeutic plan development.

Emphasized throughout CUW’s curriculum, applied learning in small groups with high instructor access is critical to your development and success as a future pharmacist. The pharmaceutics course series includes two teaching laboratory courses, Pharmaceutics II and Advanced Pharmaceutical Preparations, to provide hands-on opportunities to build your skills for success as a pharmacist.

Clinical and administrative sciences

While biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences courses form a critical foundation and core of the knowledge you’ll need, clinical and administrative sciences are also important. They comprise the knowledge, skills, and language necessary to apply your unique training to your patients and other healthcare team members.

There are three areas of focus within the clinical and administrative domains of our curriculum:

Therapeutics

Therapeutics builds directly on the principle of patients as people. This curriculum area ties directly to medication therapy decisions that consider not just drug delivery and drug action principles but the full scope of each patient’s clinical picture.

Therapeutics serves as the capstone area where it comes all together, taking into account all factors of real-life patients, molecular to global influences on the success or challenges with their medication plan, and everything in between.

CUW’s therapeutics curriculum covers all primary disease states from head to toe and the cutting-edge medications used to treat these conditions. You will learn from those who provide exceptional instruction to students and extraordinary patient care to patients every day. When you learn about infectious disease, it’s from a pharmacist who saw a patient that same morning at an infectious disease service in a local hospital. When you learn about diabetes, it’s from a pharmacist who adjusted patients’ insulin doses and ordered follow-up laboratory monitoring in her ambulatory care clinic the day before.

Social and administrative sciences

You will learn about patients’ experiences and interactions with the healthcare system in social and administrative sciences. You’ll investigate how patients make decisions about the care providers they seek, the therapies and medications they adhere to, and their motivations and challenges to taking medications. We focus on the whole person: interpersonal, social, cultural, legal, ethical, and economic factors. At the cornerstone of these courses is the understanding that the best medications are only valuable when they’re affordable, culturally acceptable, and practical for patients to use in their daily activities.

Drug information and literature evaluation

More than any other healthcare profession, patients and other healthcare providers expect pharmacists to be the experts on drugs and, therefore, the best-trained interpreters of drug information. That is the key word: interpreters.

Drug information is everywhere. On the Internet. In social media. On TV. However, the fact that everyone can access drug information doesn’t mean that everyone can interpret what that information is saying. Concordia incorporates the skills needed to be exceptional interpreters of drug and medical literature’s vast wealth of information. The cornerstone of this preparation comes from the two-course series Medical Literature Evaluation, where you’ll master the language of studies and guidelines that inform cutting-edge patient care.  Application of these skills comes in active learning in the curriculum, as well as in the Applied Patient Care teaching laboratories and experiential education.