A Survey of State Board of Pharmacy Members and Continuing Education Providers' Views on Continuing Education
Legally accountable to the public, state boards of pharmacy are continually confronted with the problem of maintaining the quality of pharmacy practice. One approach to accomplishing this task has been to implement mandatory continuing education requirements for relicensure. This study evaluated the perceived effectiveness and deficiencies of various states' continuing education regulations. A 40-question survey was mailed to 600 pharmacy board members and continuing education providers to determine their attitudes toward continuing education, support of mandatory continuing education, and their opinion of alternative methods for improving the quality of pharmacy practice. Responses from approximately one-half of those surveyed indicate board members and continuing education providers were positively disposed toward continuing education. However, there was room for improvement in most states' mandatory continuing education regulations. A relicensure examination was considered to be the best method to ensure competency, while mandatory continuing education was viewed as acceptable to pharmacists, and relatively easy to administer. The consequences of the study's findings for modifying state continuing education regulations is discussed.
Law-medicine notes: report of the Secretary's Commission on Medical Malpractice.
A PREVIOUS column1 reported on the major findings of the Secretary's Commission on Medical Practice.2 The report, as noted in the first column, has been severely criticized by the American Medical ...
Measuring Sheet Resistances of Dielectrics Using Co‐Planar Hydrogel Electrochemical Cells with Practical Applications to Characterize the Protective Quality of Paints on Sculptures
Electrical properties of thin dielectric films at the solid-liquid phase boundary are an important performance characteristic of many devices, coatings and sensors. In this paper, co-polymeric hydrogels of polyacrylic acid co-sulfonic acid, swollen with a salt solution to act as the solid electrolyte, were used to assess interfaces using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) in a co-planar geometry. Silane-modified glasses were characterized by the co-planar hydrogel EIS cell and found to be distinguishable based on their surface monolayer chemistry. EIS measurements were also made on primed and painted metal substrates, using both test panels and an outdoor sculpture, Tony Smith's Stinger. The panels were then exposed to accelerated and outdoor weathering and showed degradation on the surface paint layers, which was observable electrochemically using EIS and confirmed visually by SEM. Electrochemical spectral features were compared between data from a standard paint-test cell versus this co-planar hydrogel cell; both cell types were able to measure coating capacitance, providing useful information about the condition of the bulk coating. Yet, sheet resistance (Rs) was a spectral feature seen only by the co-planar hydrogel cell. Thus, it can be concluded that the use of such co-planar hydrogel cells can provide an earlier warning sign to coating degradation and such cells provide a new type of spectral information that is not assessable by the standard geometry.