Ware Fellow leads research into Monash’s own MyDispense
One year into her tenure, Dr Harjit Singh reflects on her work as the second Ware Fellow.
Ware Fellow Dr Harjit Singh didn’t grow up aspiring to study pharmacy. As a self-professed nerdy high school student, she wanted to become a dentist, but her dreams were dashed when her VCE results weren’t as high as she had hoped. Against the advice of her school principal, she turned down an accounting scholarship, before deciding to study pharmaceutical sciences instead.
Dr Harjit Singh
Fast forward to 2021, and Singh was announced as the second recipient of the John and Nariel Ware Fellowship in Pharmacy Education and Leadership at the Monash Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. But what led Singh from an undergraduate pharmaceutical science degree to the Ware Fellowship at Monash?
By the time she graduated from RMIT with a Bachelor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2011, Singh’s passion for pharmacy was well and truly lit, and she knew she wanted to pursue a Bachelor of Pharmacy. She was offered a place at every pharmacy school she applied to, but a desire to stay close to home saw her return to her alma mater.
By 2017, Singh was combining work in a community pharmacy with a tutoring role at RMIT, and says that teaching was a revelation.
“I loved it. I loved seeing students grow and build their confidence and really develop their pharmacy practice skills,” she explains.
Realising this was something she wanted to pursue, Singh decided to undertake a PhD. She focused her PhD research on the outcomes of community pharmacists as health coaches, which allowed her to run her project in the community pharmacy where she worked while continuing to tutor undergraduate students.
Singh spent another year tutoring students and working at the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s Parkville COVID vaccination clinic before being announced as the recipient of the Ware Fellowship in November 2021. The two-year postdoctoral position, endowed by long-time patrons and friends of the Faculty, John and Nariel Ware, is designed to grow the capacity of future academic pharmacy leaders by combining investigations of current instructional practices with a leadership development program. Singh is the second recipient of the Fellowship, following on from Dr Kayley Lyons.
John and Nariel Ware in 2019 at the launch event for the John and Nariel Ware Fellowship in Pharmacy Education and Leadership
While Singh’s PhD delved into opportunities for pharmacists to educate and coach, the Ware Fellowship’s focus lies with the education of pharmacy students, and her current research falls squarely in that area. She is honing in on MyDispense – the Monash-developed online pharmacy simulator now used in more than 200 pharmacy schools around the world. Singh’s research is interrogating the software itself and how it’s being implemented overseas and here at Monash.
“Why is it not being used by other pharmacy schools in Australia?” she asks. “What more can we do?”
Singh is setting out to develop a framework for implementing MyDispense to enhance its utilisation and user experience, both in-house and globally.
As she approaches the first anniversary of her appointment, Singh reflects on the work she has undertaken this year, examining the barriers and facilitators to implementing MyDispense. The study, which looked at low, intermediate, and high MyDispense users, as well as non-users, involved conducting interviews with pharmacy educators at Monash, elsewhere in Australia and around the world.
“We’ve transcribed the interviews, looked at themes and subthemes, and we've got an idea as to what the barriers are to using it and what the facilitators are. And hopefully, we can use that information to our advantage and help assist with the development of a framework.”
The framework project is slated for 2023. But this year Singh has also led a systematic review of the perceptions and experiences of students who have undergone high-fidelity assessments in pharmacy education.
“What I want to know is how they feel about it. If it's stressing them out, then what can we do later down the track to assist with that? Or if they feel like it's not really mimicking reality, what can we do to assist with that?”
The results of the review, which are being written up now, will help inform how high-fidelity assessments and tools that mimic reality, like MyDispense, can be used in pharmacy education in the future.
With Monash’s stellar reputation and standing within the pharmacy education league, Singh knew that securing a Fellowship here would be an incredible opportunity to further her academic career. Since she started in late 2021, she says the Director of Pharmacy, Dr Dan Malone, and all her colleagues have gone above and beyond to make her feel included and part of the team.
“I’m really well supported and coached in my role, and I know that I’ll be able to grow in my desire to deliver professional and impactful work.”
