54th IPSF Congress, Educational Symposium

This week, the biggest yearly world event for pharmacy students, the IPSF Congress takes place in Cluj Napoca, Romania.
The schedule includes different areas of interest for students and offers them a great variety of events, venues, symposiums, social events, all in a full 10 days package.

Three whole days of the congress are dedicated to the Educational and Scientific Symposia, which I personally got very much involved in, as a coordinator. We are proud to say that all the events so far and the symposiums especially were a great success from our point of view as well as the speakers' and congress participants'.

This year's theme for the Symposiums are current health care issues with increasing importance for nowadays practitioners.

“New Challenges in the Pharmacy Profession”, theme for the Educational Symposium, is a wide subject that one could probably debate on for days, but our highly appreciated speakers from the Faculties of Pharmacy in London (Prof. Ian Bates), Bath (Dr. Raisa Laaksonen) and Helsinki (Katja Hakkarainen and Dr. Simon Bell) were here to present and discuss with congress participants issues like: Curriculum development to promote lifelong learning and critical thinking, Key concepts about preparing to be a practitioner (educational reform, experiential learning and competence), Competencies needed to become an Eight Star Pharmacist and practical skills needed to conduct an educational research project.

As for the Scientific Symposium, the theme being “Quality of Pharmaceuticals – Idealism vs Reality”, we had speakers from Romanian National Agency of Drug Control, a Senior Lecturer from the Department of Drugs Analysis, the Faculty of Cluj Napoca, and the Secretary of WHO Expert Committee on Specifications for Pharmaceutical Preparations and Drug Quality Assurance. They debated on the subject from each point of view and presented different methods of analysis to detect counterfeit or poor quality medicine in the supply chain. The lectures as well as the workshops were highly educative with a large number of attendants.

Other IPSF workshops taking place during congress days are:
Humanitarian workshop,
Counterfeit Drugs workshop,
Tobacco Alert workshop,
HIV/AIDS Awareness workshop
Healthy Living and Diabetes workshop
Tuberculosis workshop
Pharmacy Practice Awareness Campaign workshop

Competitions for congress participants: Patient Counseling Event competition and Poster exhibition on Counterfeit medicines.

At this time we have 4 days of congress ahead of us, so many things are still to happen, but we as organizers try as hard as we can to make this a pleasant experience for each participant and hope that everything turns out as planned, or even better.

Viva la Pharmacie!

Kind regards from sunny Romania!

Oana Rujan
LIT and Symposia Coordinator for the 54th IPSF Congress, Cluj-Napoca, Romania