The Medical College of Wisconsin’s pharmacy school has received accreditation to launch in August 2017.
The School of Pharmacy will include a three-year doctor of pharmacy curriculum aimed at giving students early exposure to various clinical settings and research in specialties, including precision medicine, pediatrics, pharmacogenomics, primary care, cancer and psychiatry.
The initial class of about 40 students will begin courses on Aug. 14.
The school was recently granted pre-candidate status by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education, which is the culmination of three years of work to bring the school to fruition, said John Raymond, president and chief executive officer of MCW.
MCW announced in 2015 that it planned to open a school of pharmacy in an existing space at the Wauwatosa campus. The school’s total startup cost was estimated to be around $30 million over five years, with MCW’s Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment providing $3 million for initial design and development.
It’s the only three-year pharmacy program in the Midwest located at an academic medical center, according to MCW.
“The School of Pharmacy is a collaborative endeavor to educate the pharmacists of the future, and to create new and innovative practice models and inter-professional health care teams that leverage the role of the pharmacist to deliver patient-centered care with improved health outcomes,” Raymond said.
MCW touted the program’s plans to incorporate longitudinal inter-professional education, which will allow pharmacy students to learn with other health care students, including medical students.
“The MCW School of Pharmacy is one of only a few pharmacy schools in the country offering a three-year PharmD degree, blending 124 years of rich medical education tradition at MCW with cutting-edge educational technologies and team-based learning models found in our 21st century pharmacy school curriculum,” said George MacKinnon III, founding dean of the MCW School of Pharmacy.
The MCW School of Pharmacy offers dual degree pipeline programs with partner institutions, Wisconsin Lutheran College, Carroll University and St. Norbert University. That six-year program include three years of undergraduate curriculum at a partner institution followed by three years of study in the PharmD curriculum at MCW.
