Questionnaire development

Data were collected through a paper–pencil self-administered questionnaire, which composed of four parts. Part 1 assessed participants’ gender, university, grade point average (GPA), study plan (5-year or 6-year program), specialty tracks (PC or IP), and planned workplace. Part 2 asked participants about their perceived professional core competency assessed by six domains (35 items); for example, domain 1 assessed professional ethics (three items), domain 2 PC services (seven items), and so on. The six domains (35 items) of professional core competencies are shown in Table 1. Respondents were asked to rate their level of confidence in performing tasks according to Thai pharmacy professional core competency framework, announced by the Pharmacy Council of Thai-land in 2012.15,16 Part 3 assessed self-perception of eight soft-skills (eg, apply knowledge and skills in real-world practice, life-long learning, English skill), developed from a previous study.17 Part 4 assessed their perception of pharmacy profession and curriculum (eg, contribution of pharmacy profession toward patients’ health, 6-year program worth for future career) (Table 2). Parts 2–4 were assessed by a 5-point Likert-type scale, where score 5=strongly agree and 1=strongly disagree.

Perceived professional core competencies (six domains) of Thai pharmacy graduates (N=1,744)

Respondent self-perception and perceptions toward pharmacy profession (N=1,744)

Note:

The questionnaire was reviewed for content validity by three faculty staff with more than 10 years of teaching experiences from three different pharmacy schools. After the questionnaire was revised with respect to received recommendations, it was pretested by the fifth year PharmD students from a public university who completed all course requirements and were qualified to take professional clerkship rotations. The overall internal consistency of 35-item perceived professional competency was 0.960, assessed by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. Using factor analysis to discover patterns of relationship between the 35 items, perceived professional competencies could be grouped into six domains, including professional ethics, system management, medication selection and procurement, PC, primary health care and consumer protection, and pharmaceutical industry. The internal consistency for each factor was 0.766, 0.893, 0.876, 0.918, 0.913, and 0.925, respectively.