CEimpact Podcast

Club "J" - Making Journal Clubs Fun and Effective

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Think journal clubs are a heavy lift? That they can't be done in a small pharmacy environment? Worried that you don't have enough statistical savvy? Listen to this episode and you'll discover how journal clubs can be incorporated into just about any setting with some simple strategies. The value they bring is immense - NAPLEX preparation for graduating students, expanded clinical knowledge for the learner and staff, the development of confidence and communication skills in your students and residents, and much more.

In this episode, I talked with Dr. Valerie Coppenrath, a drug information guru and preceptor for both residents and students. She shares some background on the concept, and also provides us with some practical strategies for taking a more intentional approach to supporting our students and residents in their own professional identity journey. And who knows, maybe we’ll learn a little about ourselves along the way as well.

Kathy Schott, PhD
Vice President, Education & Operations
CEimpact

Valerie Coppenrath, PharmD
Associate Professor of Pharmacy Practice
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Get CE: CLICK HERE TO CPE CREDIT FOR THE COURSE!

CPE Information
Learning Objectives
At the end of this course, preceptors will be able to:
1. Discuss the advantages and challenges with conducting a journal club in a range of pharmacy settings.
2. List strategies for effective journal club selection.
3. Describe strategies for overcoming barriers associated with setting up a successful journal club.

0.05 CEU/0.5 Hr
UAN: 0107-0000-23-342-H99-P
Initial release date: 10/18/2023
Expiration date: 10/18/2026
Additional CPE details can be found here.

The speakers have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose.

This program has been:
Approved by the Minnesota Board of Pharmacy as education for Minnesota pharmacy preceptors.

Reviewed by the Texas Consortium on Experiential Programs and has been designated as preceptor education and training for Texas preceptors.


Want more information on this and related topics?

Mastering Journal Club Facilitation: A Toolkit for Engaging Learners
This comprehensive collection of resources, tools, and best practice tips has been designed to help you facilitate an organized, effective, and engaging journal club experience, regardless of where you practice.

Journal Club Toolkit for Learners
A companion to the toolkit for preceptors, this robust resource provides residents and students with checklists, templates, guidance on journal selection, and much more.

Biostatistics Refresher
This course provides a crash course review in statistics to help you evaluate the literature and communicate its implications to providers and patients.

As always, be sure to check out the full library of courses available for preceptors on the CEimpact website. Be sure to ask your experiential program director if you are a member so that you can access it all for free AND get CE credit!

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Precept to Practice, ce Impact's podcast, created specifically for pharmacy preceptors. Each month we cover a topic that is focused on helping you connect to resources and ideas that can help you improve your precepting practice, become a more effective teacher and mentor, and balance the business that comes with these additional but important responsibilities. In today's episode we're talking about journal clubs. Have you strayed away from using them as a teaching activity because they seem like too heavy of a lift that they can't be done in a small pharmacy environment? Or are you worried that you don't have enough statistical savvy? I understand those concerns and even shared many of them before recording this episode. The value a journal club activity can bring is immense. They can be a great NaPLEX preparation tool for graduating students, they expand clinical knowledge for the learner and staff, and they develop confidence and communication skills in both students and residents.

Speaker 1:

In this podcast episode I talked with Dr Valerie Coppenrath, a drug information specialist and preceptor for both students and residents. She shares some background on the concept and also provides us with some practical strategies for taking a more intentional approach to journal club development at our site. She has some really creative ideas and some great ideas on how to make this activity work in a whole range of environments. Let's listen in Well. Welcome Valerie. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'm really excited to talk about journal clubs and talk about some new resources that we have to support preceptors who are trying to organize journal clubs for their pharmacy learners, whether that be students or residents or even just colleagues. So thank you so much for being here with me to talk about that.

Speaker 2:

Yes, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

If we could just start by having a share a little bit about your own background and what you do, and maybe how you've come to care about the whole journal club scene.

Speaker 2:

Sure, sure. So my name is Valerie Coppenrath. I'm a full-time faculty member in an accelerated school of pharmacy and I also have a practice site as a family medicine pharmacist. So I have API students there at my practice site. But I support a family medicine medical residency and at the university I teach in the drug literature evaluation and informatics series. So journal clubs are something that I've always. You know, I was a resident and we did journal clubs. I did a residence in journal clubs as a student, I did them as a resident, I've done them at all my practice sites for different sets of learners and it's just something that I really, really love.

Speaker 2:

I got kind of onto it when I did the Tufts information mastery series a couple of years ago and that really kind of kickstarted it for me and made a lot of things really clear and then made me excited to talk about it with other people and I really feel strongly that if you know what you're reading, then it makes it easy to read more, like if you, if it's. I really focus with my students on kind of reading.

Speaker 2:

comprehension is kind of what I try to get at, like all that vocabulary is really really helpful, because then you can read anything else new that comes out, if you know what they're trying to tell you.

Speaker 1:

Right, right. It's kind of like taking a template and applying it to the next thing.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, yes, like a language, it's really like another language.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, that's a great analogy. This might seem simplistic, but if you would just define what a journal club is, just describe it, and then maybe we could talk a little bit about the benefits of conducting those on a routine basis.

Speaker 2:

So I really think, I think journal club can take a lot of different forms and I think that, no matter what form it takes, it's really a chance to either teach or evaluate drug literature appraisal skills, and then also, at the same time it gives attendees the opportunities to learn new information, something new, so you kind of get something out of it.

Speaker 1:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, great. Well, I'm anxious to learn about the idea that journal clubs can take many forms, so I'll be anxious to hear a little, learn a little bit more about that as we continue our conversation. Just talk a little bit about some of the benefits that you've seen, either as a participant I mean, you've been on all sides of this now so either as a participant, as a student, learner, resident, but then also as a preceptor and practitioner, sure, yeah, talk us through that a little bit.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I think for students I think it's easy Our students, our NAPLEX exam like they're still learning, they're still studying, and our NAPLEX exam asks some basic drug information questions, drug literature evaluation questions and some basic bio stats questions. And a journal club, I think, is just a perfect way to teach these skills and also practice these skills. And even on top of just beyond the drug lit topic itself, also just being able to use a journal club to teach a landmark study and talk about the treatment of diabetes or the treatment of hypertension is just a huge, I think, a very engaging way to teach as well. So it could be a presentation but also a way to teach some information too.

Speaker 2:

And then for residents you know they've already passed the NAPLEX, hopefully, so they get that like they've kind of gotten through there, but they can also just continue to expand their clinical knowledge base by reading. Just the more you read, the more you know about a particular area. So I think that's really really helpful. And then staff I think that any staff at your site, I think it's really helpful for them to be able to come and encourage the learners that are there for sure, but I also think that it's very helpful for them to learn something new too. So you have new drugs, new side effects of drugs, new controversies that come out, and that's all something that can happen, and I know for me personally as, like an attendee, I'm always a reader. I love to read anything, so this makes me biased, but I love to read about clinical trials too, and I love like I love a good book club.

Speaker 2:

I love to talk about what I'm reading also, because I think that that's a really good way for me to elaborate what I'm learning and to be able to actually make it stick for me, and so the opportunity to learn something new with a new clinical trial and also kind of talk about well, you know, here's what I think or here's what I don't like about this trial, or yeah, but did you think about this either? And being able to have that dialogue I think really dispersoning engages me as a learner too, even as a faculty member and an API preceptor.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, the book club is a great analogy too, because I'm in a book club as well.

Speaker 1:

And you know, even if it's a book, that you just find more nuance when you discuss it. You know, when you're discussing with other who come with a different perspective and that's true with with clinical trials as well. I also feel like you know, a lot of times students have their literature evaluation course early in the program and then they're done, and so the experiential environment, either as a student or a resident, is really a great place to revisit those skills and strengthen them along the way. Talk a little bit about what you consider to be some critical steps in setting up a sustainable journal club. You know, I think this is one of those things where it doesn't make sense to just do the one off. There needs to be a plan to sort of operationalize it and make it easier, you know. So it's not a new lift every time.

Speaker 2:

Yes. So I definitely think that making it a habit is the most important piece for me. So I know that now I have you know, I have a six week rotation and I've just built it into my rotation schedule. I know that there are always going to be. I usually I have three students, so I usually do three journal clubs. Again, I love journal clubs, so that's why I do so many, but I do I know that they're going to be on Fridays during weeks two, three and four of my six week rotation, and that's just, I already have it in there. It's in my rotation calendar on a recurring basis and outlook, and so I just it's already there. I don't even have to think about it.

Speaker 2:

The biggest lift is, like, what are we going to do? Like, which article are we going to do? I do this journal club in small groups at the college for this, because I consider this journal club to be like the teaching journal club, and so it's just a small group. I have my students select the articles and I know that those students are going to give a presentation later on in their rotation. So I always encourage these students to pick something that relates to their presentation, so that way like not only are we doing the teaching and the learning about drug lit, but also they're going to become really well versed in some article that they're going to get to talk about in their presentation too, and they really like that opportunity to do that.

Speaker 2:

And again, like my, you know my goal is different for that journal club because it's to teach rather than to evaluate, because I know I'm going to have an opportunity later on in the rotation for evaluation. But then I also do journal club at my practice site for the medical residents. And again, that's just, it's just become a habit at our site. The medical resident that organizes the schedule for noon conference just has it built in that we're going to do at least one journal club a month and she assigns a different medical resident to pick the article each time and from there, like it's the noon conference, everybody. It's already what they're doing already there. It's just expected that everybody who's there on that site that day is going to come and attend the journal club. So that's again it's like just when it's built in.

Speaker 2:

So getting past that for you know it'll have some growing pains at first when you first start to incorporate something but having something that's regular and recurring, I think is really, really helpful for me as a planner. But also kind of getting people there too and I don't know if it's possible.

Speaker 2:

I know that when I was a resident we did different presentations and we offered CE and I think anytime you can offer CE it really gets people. You know butts in the seats to be able to get everybody to come, because everybody loves to be able to do a nice local CE during their business hours. So that does open up a whole other. You know it's a whole other thing to become accredited and get all that going, but if you can, if you do the opportunity to do that, you might be able to get a different couple, different types of attendees at your journal club.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, that's a great suggestion. Do you use like a templated format for journal clubs or that you provide for students or residents or colleagues who are conducting these, so that there's some consistency across the board?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I definitely have used that in the past, for sure, Certainly something when I was kind of starting out as an API preceptor. But now you know, I've been teaching druglet for several years now, a couple decades now.

Speaker 1:

And so I don't?

Speaker 2:

it's easy for me that, no matter what my students bring me, I don't even read the article in advance anymore and we read it together and I can kind of. It's almost like I'm giving a new lecture each time, but like being able to. It's very interactive because I can just I'm basically going through it line by line when I do it like this for the small group, going through it line by line and just kind of highlighting all the vocabulary and using the article to express the vocabulary right. So oh, this is randomized what. It's actually really funny when you try to ask a student what does randomized mean?

Speaker 2:

They don't really know, like they know that they use that phrase all the time, but when it, what does it really mean? When it's a randomized controlled trial and that's important, kathy, because on the board exam, the types of questions that we see, like in our review books that we have they don't really just ask you like, was this a randomized controlled trial, they just tell you about what they actually did without using the word randomized, and the student has to be able to identify that. That's what randomization is, you know?

Speaker 1:

And so it's really important to think about what these words mean.

Speaker 2:

So I don't I don't have to use a template anymore, but it was great to use when I was first starting out. For sure, now I can really just use the whole, like just go through the article and here's the different sections of the article and use that to make sure that I hit all that kind of definitions that I want to hit, because, again, my focus in that small group is is a like teaching, yeah, teaching rather than evaluation but for other settings.

Speaker 2:

I certainly do like when we do drug lit journal clubs at the school, at the college. We absolutely give them a template because it's the first time that they're doing it.

Speaker 2:

Sure yeah, and we also we sometimes have other faculty or who are helping us out and it's helpful for the other faculty to do it as well. So I do think it's helpful to have those kind of building blocks, but after a while you might find that you don't necessarily need to use the checklist every time. But it's certainly great for people who are just being students and faculty members and preceptors who are starting out.

Speaker 1:

Right, right, kind of like training wheels, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yes, exactly Like training wheels.

Speaker 1:

You talked a little bit about a journal club selection at one of the things. One of the things you mentioned and I appreciate this is that if a student has a project at the end of the rotation or a resident has their project related to the residency, selecting literature, that sort of feeds, to inform that. So that seems like a strategy that makes a lot of sense. What are some other like journal selection strategies that would be helpful? Because I think that that's probably one of the hurdles for folks is finding the literature. Finding literature that's going to be a good teaching tool, finding literature that's going to advance some clinical knowledge yes, so definitely I like the idea of having it feed into a project or a presentation.

Speaker 2:

But sometimes our students do naplex readiness exams throughout their API year and so sometimes I'll say, well, what do you guys have coming up on your naplex readiness exam and why don't we pick something that's related to that and they like that too. And then I've also gone through phases where if I'm trying to teach myself something new, then I'll say, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to do several cardiovascular outcomes trials related to diabetes drugs, and I'll go through like a theme where I want to be able to teach a therapeutic area as well as the druglet concepts too. So like even just landmark trials and diabetes is one of my favorite things to do. If I'm looking for something kind of familiar, if I'm using it for evaluation, I generally like to have the student choose something because I feel like it'll make it a little bit more personal for them. But I would just caution you to make sure that you have some sort of an approval process where you can kind of take a look at it and see if it's going to meet your needs as well and like meet the needs for everybody that's there.

Speaker 2:

And then also I think I would say that randomized controlled trials are probably what you know, at least our students are probably best prepared to evaluate and, to be honest, probably what are most commonly tested on the boards in terms of the vocabulary. But the students should know the basic definitions of other types of trials and definitely where they fall in the hierarchy of the strength of evidence. If you remember back to that pyramid of the levels of evidence, with meta-analyses at the top and you know anecdotal evidence at the bottom, they should really know, they should be able to talk about a couple different kinds. But so RCTs are usually. I usually try to ask my students let's find an RCT to do first and I can make sure that you get all that vocabulary out of the way and then we can start looking at cohort trials or meta-analyses or systematic reviews and kind of still take away something from there.

Speaker 2:

But if you're looking for inspiration. One of the things I think one of the best things I did was signing up for like a free website like Medscape or something that will email you when new things come out. And so I get little headlines like every day or so that's like oh, here's this new trial that just came out. I just saw something like just something this morning Kathy that came in that said that Paxlovid is good for preventing long COVID. So like oh, I kind of put that email aside and was like off to pull that article and like that's a great article to be able to do for Journal Club and so whenever if you're looking for something like that and you've got a big group and you're trying to make sure that you can engage people, kind of doing something that's like hot off the press is helpful too.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, that's a great idea. We drop a new Game Changers Pharmacotherapy podcast episode every week and it is I'd say 75% of it is targeted on the literature that you're talking about. So we're monitoring those same things and looking at that research that's coming out that's going to impact pharmacy practice and then focusing on that. So that makes a lot of sense, a benefit to the practitioner too.

Speaker 2:

Yes, certainly.

Speaker 1:

What would you say are some barriers that you or challenges that you've experienced in establishing a successful journal club?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I think that it's definitely difficult to engage everybody. I might practice that especially student like the residents are coming off of clinic and they have to go grab lunch and then they're coming in and kind of everybody comes in a couple minutes late so it's always difficult to have everybody there on time or just like having them put away their clinical work to come and do something educational. So that's always a hard thing to do In terms of like engagement with students. If I have a small group of students if I did I found that when I was doing the presentation version in a small group of students, if the student didn't present it, if they didn't prepare it, then they kind of felt like they could check out and not really pay attention for the rest of it.

Speaker 2:

So that's one of the many reasons that I kind of switched over to doing the small group discussion based type of a journal club. So I can I just kind of rotate the questions that I like, who I direct my questions to. If I have three students, sometimes as a faculty member, I can kind of rotate which student I'm kind of addressing first and let's allow stakes kind of a situation that they don't know. We can just ask the next student, of course, but they're definitely more engaged because they're sitting right in front of me and we're all talking about the same article. So that's one way that I've kind of shifted to be able to engage people. I know that we've called it different things over the years. I know when I was a resident at my hospital, boston Medical Center, we called it club J instead of journal club which was just the silliest thing but like it just like.

Speaker 2:

Oh, it's like a fun nightclub. We're going to go. We're going to go to the club this week and it's club J, and so we just thought that we were so hilarious calling it that back then. And then we also I've done different practice sites. We've done, instead of journal club, we've done journal rounds, which is where you can. Again, you can kind of do it however you like.

Speaker 2:

But journal rounds would be one way is like you would give each learner, everybody who's going to be there, a different journal. So somebody would take JAMA, somebody would take new internal medicine, somebody takes a journal from the American Diabetes Society or something like that, and everybody, like they just look at the table of contents for the last month or so and pick out, like here's a couple of articles that I thought were interesting, and you share a few articles at a high level rather than like one article in great depth, and so that's kind of a different way. You can kind of change it up a little bit and do a couple of different things, and that's kind of a different ways that you can engage people. I know that time constraints are very you know, of course, very, very real Some preceptors, who have very busy practice sites, don't have, like I do. I have three hours each block to do this. You know three different journal clubs. You just don't have that.

Speaker 2:

And then I think something else that people really need to think about, too is artificial intelligence, and it's important to know that students today can use artificial intelligence, like chat, gpt and a number of other free websites, to generate summaries of published trials and provide outlines for slide decks, and so I think we're going to you know, like what, what you can do. I think one of the things that I'm doing is, again, rather than doing a paper, like, write me a paper or give me a presentation, doing more of these discussions and dialogues is really my way of knowing that it's the student that did the work, rather than the artificial intelligence that did the work Right right, because you might be a, you might have a nice written summary, but you probably can't be us your way through talking about it, you know exactly yes, it's a lot harder to talk about it.

Speaker 2:

When somebody is asking you pointed questions and when you're just reading something off of what you've done, and you know, I mean hopefully your presentations are more engaging than that. But I mean, many people do just kind of stand up there and read their slides. So you could I think that you can still use AI to generate something like that for you if that's what you needed to do. So I think that the dialogue is kind of how I personally, you know, as an educator today is what I'm trying to shift and do more dialogue rather than presentations and papers.

Speaker 1:

Right, right, yeah, it really. I mean, ai is really going to, I think, shift some of the shift how we assess learning in a lot of ways, because it's going to have to be a little bit more. There's going to have to be more probing about whether or not you know what it is that you're talking about. So, exactly, yeah, that's a great call out. Well, what about? What about folks who maybe are in a small health system, a rural location, where you know you've got multiple students, you can pull together for small groups, you've got, you know, a group of residents under a single row, if you can pull together, and, of course, your colleagues? Any ideas for folks who might have some of those barriers because it's just a student or it's just a resident, or you know, there's just it's just a more remote location?

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes. So I think that even with that, when you just it's more like one on one, I think, is really where the dialogue and the the teachable kind of a journal club really does come through. Like you want to have the student read it in advance, but if you know it's going to be a dialogue, it doesn't seem so awkward to have like one student give you a presentation where it's just right in the audience, and I think that that really does help. You want them to be prepared and you can still use it as a way to assess and to evaluate them. But if you can kind of do it as a, you know, sitting down at a table rather than with slides, I think that might mean be not as awkward.

Speaker 2:

And I do think. I think that if you have even doing it in short bits, so if you don't have a whole hour to do something, you know once a rotation, but maybe can you do a couple minutes here and there and kind of okay, well, let's just talk about the method section today, and then next time we'll have another 15 minutes and we'll talk about the results section and then maybe the next time we'll call out and say like, well, let's think about the clinical applications of that article. Maybe doing it in shorter bits, even in between patients, or something like that, depending on your practice site, might be helpful too.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, which you know really might replicate actual learning, you know in 10 minute parts and force a little more recall.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, I like that idea a lot. That's just something we hear a lot from folks who are practicing. You know, in community pharmacy maybe you're in a small healthcare system that it's difficult sometimes to have some of these activities because they're you don't have the group that you can engage in. It's more of this one on one. But I love this concept of you know this small group or one on one teaching type journal club, because that changes the game a little bit. I think, yeah, yeah, love it. We talked through some of the challenges and sort of mitigating those. How do you support your learners who maybe struggle with presentation skills? I know the dialogue aspect of things, you know when you're doing one on one, that seems like a great strategy for that. But are you providing any other supports for folks, for learners who you know might struggle with presentation skills, maybe are really struggling with the understanding of basic statistics or might have some other challenges?

Speaker 2:

Yes, yeah, so presentation skills and communication skills. There's another like area that I just love and I love to have an elective on communication skills before I did more core teaching, so I just this is another area that's very close to my heart and I really think that the key to presentation skills is practice. I really can't underline it, you know, circle it, highlight it more for my students is just to give them build in opportunities to practice if you can, if you're, if your schedule allows it, but I do. I make them give me their whole presentation, even though it's just me, like the. The students give me their whole presentation, to just me, and I give them feedback that's formative, so it doesn't count as their grade, but it's formative feedback, and I give them some feedback of like, hey, I think you should know this didn't quite make any sense. So I need you to switch the organization of this slide a little bit and just like get all those mistakes out. They make all their errors, they make all like the mispronunciations and trying to think about how they're going to word something. They get all of that out the first time before they actually have to give it, and I think that it almost always results in a better. Second, try when you've given at least a dry run somewhere and like if you don't have time to do it in your rotation.

Speaker 2:

What I used to do when I was giving you know, my presentations in pharmacy school and in you know my speech classes even in college, is I would give my presentations to the microwave at my house, like in my kitchen. Because if I did it in front of a mirror, like you'll always see, like oh, do it in front of a mirror, but I was way too distracted to do it for the mirror. But the microwave gave you just the amount of reflection that you could tell if you were being distracting with your hand gestures or whatever you were doing with your face or your hair or anything. But it also had like a timer so you could set a timer on the microwave and kind of keep track of yourself that way. And so that was always my when I couldn't find a family member that I could bore to death with a half hour pharmacy presentation.

Speaker 2:

I would stand in my kitchen and give it to my microwave and that's something that I continue to tell students.

Speaker 1:

Great. That is maybe the best or most unique post tip I've ever heard. What a brilliant idea.

Speaker 2:

Yes, your microwave is a captive audience, audience member. And again, in terms of like supporting people with the basic statistics, I do again, I keep going back to this but I found that when the students were struggling with the presentation style of Journal Clubs, I needed to switch and do more of the teachable Journal Clubs and then, like, if I do one or two of the teachable Journal Clubs, then they can answer a lot more questions by the end of the rotation and, like in school, like we have, you know, a couple different co-curricular activities that we've built in. I know I just created for the I was telling you about that CE that I gave for preceptors I created a Journal Club oh, my goodness, an evidence-based medicine Jeopardy game. And so there's just again, it's all vocabulary, it's just all vocabulary, but it's in a Jeopardy style game where you can keep track of points and the students love competing against each other and saying the answer in the form of a question and everything, like they really any games that you can do just changes the tone, I guess, of what you're trying to do and makes it more playful and fun and really helps to engage your learners and so like and the great thing about Journal Club Jeopardy.

Speaker 2:

You can find free templates online, or maybe I think I made a paid a dollar for a template online so I didn't have to make it myself. And then like that's something that I never have to change, that I have, that I have. That it doesn't change. The definitions of randomized control trials doesn't change. I can continue to use that over and over again. So I did spend some time, but then now I can use it over and over again. I share it with my colleagues and it's a nice fun game to play on rotation and that's another way to kind of get them engaged.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. Well, like you said earlier, it's about teaching a language. It's not just about having the right answer, the wrong answer, it's about teaching this language. And what a great game to teach a language when you have to ask in the form of a question.

Speaker 2:

Right, exactly.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, no, that's awesome. Any resources that you would suggest? I know that I'm gonna spend some time sharing a little bit about this Journal Club kit that we've created, but I'd love to hear if there are other resources that you know about or if there are things you wish you would have known.

Speaker 2:

Yes, starting out when?

Speaker 1:

you were getting started, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I think that there's definitely a lot of checklists like literature appraisal checklists that are available online. You might. If you're a preceptor, you probably are affiliated with some college of pharmacy, so reaching out there to see if they have a template that they use for their students that you could use on your rotation is certainly a good idea I also, but there's plenty of free ones available online that you can find. Like Dynamet has a good one, the Pharmacist Letter. If you're a member of the Pharmacist Letter, I adore that resource and they have a couple of checklists also for primary literature evaluation.

Speaker 2:

Like I said, if you're a preceptor for a school, you can probably ask for access to their library at least ask for it.

Speaker 2:

I know our school will give access to our library system and then you have access to any textbook. If you have any questions, maybe because something we didn't talk about is like, maybe the preceptor doesn't feel comfortable about these evidence-based medicine concepts, and so if you have any questions about that, then you can go right to the textbooks that we use in school to be able to refresh your memory on what some of these things are too, if you feel like you need that, and I love. Like I said, I love the Pharmacist Letter. Dynamet are a really good point of care resources but they also have these good checklists and I love the Dynamet criteria for level one evidence, like it's a great checklist in itself. Just to go right down the list and look to see if they have all of these great ways to limit bias in clinical trials like concealed allocation and blinded education of outcomes and all those good vocabulary words that we've been teaching the students over the course of this.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and good call-out to you. I mean, I think there's a lot of pharmacists out there who maybe need to dust off their skills as well, and so there might be a little bit of a sort of a startup.

Speaker 2:

Right right.

Speaker 1:

Effort here to just sort of, you know, get yourself ready and feel confident in having that conversation with students or with residents, just for somebody who was getting started and may not have a ton of resources, may not have a ton of time, you know what's that? First dip your toe in the water, step that someone could take to just start to experiment a little bit.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So I think you know I said it before, but I think just putting something on your calendar like, okay, we're going to do this, like we're going to do this on this, to give yourself a couple of weeks for it and say, okay, buy this time, like my student and I or my group of students or my learners, or whatever Once for me at least, once I get it on my calendar or in my like task list, I know it'll probably get done.

Speaker 2:

And so that's like I think that's the biggest hurdle is just like booking a time and then, like the rest of it will fall into place. Because, even if nothing like nothing else, you can like check your email for the email that you got from Medscape that day and pull the article that comes from it and just like read it together. Like at the very end of the day, if you really can't do anything to prepare, all you need to do is just find an RCT and just read it together. And that's still a very, very, very valuable use of everybody's time, even if you don't do any of the stuff. But I know that there's lots of. I'm really excited to start learning about the preceptor toolkit because I know there's a lot of good resources there that I look at looks like I'm going to be able to direct my students right to this, right to this toolkit, to be able to have them do all the preparation too, which sounds really exciting.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Now, I think that's a great. I think that's a great, a great tip, and I think the other, the other piece of that is it doesn't have to be perfect and it doesn't have to be pretty and it might be a little messy, but it's really just about getting started and, you know, kind of finding your way With what works at your particular location and site.

Speaker 2:

Right and bring food. Everybody loves snacks, right.

Speaker 1:

So that's always a good thing.

Speaker 2:

Bring food, bring snacks, like encourage people to come and do it over lunch. You know that's always helpful, you know, so you don't feel like you're everybody's getting a break at least from their clinical activities and you could do something different. So snacks and candy, and you know all that stuff is always, you know, not not expected, I think, but always appreciated. And when you do something like that, absolutely Well, I just at least we're first try.

Speaker 1:

We're a fun atmosphere to that. I don't know why food does that, but it just, yes, exactly All right. Well, val, I thank you very much for sharing your time and expertise around this topic. You know we've been committed to the Journal Club space for a long time and we're kind of shifting gears now, moving away from a virtual Journal Club into providing this toolkit that I'm going to share a little bit about, and I'm hoping that it really helps facilitate some of that learning. You know, at the, at the, you know on site and face to face with with individual learners, whether those be students or residents. So we're excited to have the opportunity to share some resources that we think will support folks. So, yeah, thank you so much. This was great, thank you.

Speaker 1:

I had no idea how flexible and fun a Journal Club could be. Before talking to Valerie, I really envisioned Journal Clubs as formal presentations given by nervous students or residents over probably a cold sandwich in the staff break room, and that vision has completely been changed. If you aren't including Journal Clubs in your clinical teaching, you're missing out. Journal Clubs don't have to be a formal or highly structured activity Certainly they can be, but they can also be simple conversations that ensure your learners are building a vocabulary for medical literature, help them expand their clinical knowledge and yours, and that you're preparing them to practice evidence based medicine. I know that you likely have many more questions, though. How should learners be assessed? What should I be looking for or focused on when discussing literature with them? How can I beef up my own literature evaluation skills?

Speaker 1:

Cimpact has created a Journal Club toolkit for preceptors. It contains everything you need to get started checklists, evaluation tools, guidance for different practice sites, templates and much more. There's also a companion kit for your students and residents that provides guidance, examples and templates. So check out the show notes for links to both of those toolkits and think about integrating them into the experiences that you provide. There's also a couple of other resources noted in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

There's a bio stats refresher If you need a refresh before you feel like you can talk statistics with your students and residents. This is a great course for you. And then also just a quick refresher or a quick update on how to develop and lead a Journal Club activity at your APPE site. It's just a quick reference for making Journal Clubs more meaningful in any setting and provide some strategies and how to standardize presentations and use literature evaluation checklists To make this exercise manageable and effective. If you're a precepting APPE students and, as always, be sure to check out the full library of courses available for preceptors on the CE Impact website. Be sure that you ask your experiential program director or your residency program director, if you're a member, so that you can access it all for free. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you next time on Preceptor Practice.