The Resilience of Final-Year Pharmacy Students and Aspects of the Course They Found to Be Resilience-Building

• Main Authors: Lezley-Anne Hanna (Author), Simone Clerkin (Author), Maurice Hall (Author), Rebecca Craig (Author), Alan Hanna (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: MDPI AG, 2022-07-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.

Summary

Background: This work aimed to investigate final year pharmacy students' resilience (as determined by the CD-RISC-25 tool), whether students considered certain aspects of the course to be resilience-building, and the role of the university in developing this attribute. Methods: Following ethical approval and an invitation to participate, data were collected from consenting students at Queen's University Belfast via a pre-piloted paper-based questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were performed. To ascertain significant differences (<i>p</i> < 0.05) by gender, the Welch Two Sample <i>t</i>-test was used for the CD-RISC-25 mean scores and the Mann-Whitney U Test and Chi-squared test for Section B data. Results: The response rate was 80.61% (79/98). The mean CD-RISC-25 score for males was higher (not significantly) than the female mean score (70.39 versus 67.18, <i>p</i> = 0.2355, possible score range 0-100). While 93.67% (74/79) considered the School has a responsibility to develop resilience, <20.00% availed of the free resilience building events. Activities deemed to help build resilience included being able to make mistakes in a safe environment and needing to achieve a high grade to pass assessments. Conclusions: Resilience levels among future pharmacists at Queen's University Belfast should be improved going forward. A strategy, developed in light of conducting this research (from one institution), will now be implemented to enhance the curriculum with regard to resilience building opportunities.

Item Description

10.3390/pharmacy10040084
2226-4787