Implementation of Total Quality Management in Higher Pharmaceutical Education: Opportunity and Challenge

Abstract:

Introduction: Higher pharmaceutical education in China has made a great development in recent years. A few problems, such as unevenness of school-running level, lack of students innovation and deficiency of teaching effect, are also exposed in its rapid development. The reasons for these challenges are also revealed that old teaching mode and increasing enrollment scale in China's university may be the primary causes. Methods: To face these problems, some measures should be taken. Total quality management (TQM), as a novel teaching concept, is proposed in this article to integrate into higher pharmaceutical education in China. Results: To implement TQM, suggestions are given to emphasize on professional ethics, course quality and practice teaching. Firstly, the educators should take pharmacy moral as one of the important contents and infiltrate it in all teaching activities so as to realize the cultivation of professional ethics. In addition, in order to improve course quality, it is necessary to implement curriculum reform by broadening curriculum caliber, optimizing curriculum system and removing regional segmentation in professional courses. What's more, practice teaching should be actively adopted to combine itself with higher pharmaceutical education in China due to it being a discipline depending largely on the practice. Conclusion: It is necessary to boost the TQM step by step within a healthy system, which will play an important role in improving the quality of pharmaceutical education. Though implementation of TQM in higher pharmaceutical education faces various opportunity and challenge, the philosophy of TQM will be gradually accepted by more and more universities.

Key words: Higher pharmaceutical education, Innovative ability, Professional ethics, Total quality management.