Blended Intensive Programme

This three-year project intended to focus on complementary activities and training that can be offered to students who aim to become community and hospital pharmacists in order to help them managing their new clinical missions to patients. Clinical skills are becoming increasingly important for pharmacists as they engage in more direct patient-facing roles (e.g., counselling patients, vaccination, point of care testing, treatment follow-up, etc). Pharmacy practice has now entered the pharmaceutical care era, and pharmacy students must be prepared for new and emerging roles aligned to this.

The main project aims were to allow the students to 1- carry out theoretical (on-line) and practical (in-person) activities to enable understanding of the future role of the pharmacist in community and in the hospital, 2- acquire the skills that the new pharmacist of the post-Covid era must have in terms of knowledge and practice.

The importance of this proposed course was related to the need to fill the gap between education and practice, between theoretical preparation and practical pharmacy activities. We aim to provide solutions to our future European pharmacists based on specific experience existing in our three partner universities (Dublin, Paris, and Pavia). Interculturality is an important component of this training.

When we created and developed the idea, we ensured that the three HEIs would come together every year for the in-person teaching as well as having their chance to showcase the best clinical practices when hosting students and academics in their turn to coordinate the programme. June 2023 saw a fantastic success of the onset of this course in Pavia, Italy. In June 2024 we met in Paris, showcasing the best France had to offer. In June 2025, we showed students and academics from France and Italy what Ireland had to offer in terms of the most up-to-date clinical assets available for pharmacists in practice.