Students sharpen their patient-care skills in the Pharmaceutical Care Labs.

Hands-on activities and interaction drive the Skills Lab. Here, students work in small groups of eight to twelve under the supervision of a senior student (for the first-year labs) and practicing clinicians (for the second- and third-year labs).

This format allows students to build skills incrementally. The program also serves as an opportunity to apply the content learned in the didactic portions of the curriculum. In this way, a student learning about diabetes in his or her therapeutics class might learn how to teach a patient to use a blood glucose monitor to manage his disease while in Skills Lab.

The Skills Lab has also pioneered innovative assessment techniques such as the Objective Structured Clinical Examinations administered each semester. These examinations include actors who have been trained to play the role of patients with a specific condition or question. Students are evaluated on their ability to demonstrate a specific skill to a patient.