Happy April everyone! I hope that your weather has warmed up in the last month. I was fortunate to be able to attend the Women’s Final Four here locally at the beginning of the month, checking that off my bucket list! In less than 2 weeks, I’ll be taking a group of pharmacy students to Ireland and the UK to learn about health care systems, pharmacy practice, and pharmacy education in those countries. It’ll be my first time traveling to those countries, so it’s been a true bucket list kind of months. What’s on your personal or professional bucket list? Does it include Board Certification?
I managed to find some time to do the Literature Review Module 1B “Cardiology and Statistics (Meta-Analysis)” this month. As a reminder, as an Ambassador, the Recertification products were given to me for free by ASHP, but the opinions are solely my own.
As with other Literature Review Modules, I got full text access to 4 articles: 2 clinical studies (one being a meta-analysis and one a RCT published in NEJM) and 2 statistics articles about meta-analyses, none of which I had read previously. The meta-analysis clinical article surprised me with the strong language it used, such as “fictitious data,” and it reviewed the effect of initiating perioperative beta blockers in non-cardiac surgery. The RCT was a comparison of the angiotensin receptor-neprilysin inhibitor LCZ696 and enalapril in heart failure patients. Both were very interesting and potentially game-changing kinds of articles (How so? Read the articles to find out!).
Then it came time for the assessment. In my previous blog, I mentioned that the questions are not always straightforward. That was an understatement for this assessment. I had to score a 75% to pass, so I could miss up to 5 questions, and this was the first assessment I’ve taken where I was unsure of more questions than I was allowed to miss. Fortunately, I passed. But seriously, I spent at least 10 minutes on just one question because I had no idea what the answer was. This assessment seemed to want me to use my baseline knowledge of Cardiology. While I think this is a good thing since the activity is designed for BCPS recertification credit and there is a presumed baseline knowledge, I really wasn’t expecting those types of questions (it hasn't really been the case in other Literature Review Module assessments). As with my previous blog about Module 1A, I wish we had access to the correct answers to the assessment to promote further learning since I have NO idea which of the 6 questions I was unsure of I actually missed.
Overall, I enjoyed the Literature Review Module 1B. It got me reading published articles I hadn’t read previously and helped me review concepts about a statistical concept (in this case, meta-analyses).