Factors influencing performance on the Board Certified Psychiatric Pharmacist Examination: Passing rates and domain-level scores.

The Board Certified Psychiatric Pharmacist (BCPP) specialty certification was launched by the Board of Pharmacy Specialties in 1994. Candidates for the BCPP can qualify for the examination through 3 possible pathways: practice experience (4 years) in the specialty, completion of a PGY-1 residency plus an additional 2 years of practice experience, or completion of a PGY-2 specialty residency in psychiatric pharmacy. Recent fluctuations in the passing rate raised questions as to explanatory factors. This article represents the first published comprehensive study of candidate performance on the BCPP Examination. It describes a retrospective, observational study presenting (a) statistical trends of examination passing rates for biannual cohorts over the past 5 years, as well as (b) score distributions on the 3 performance domains of the certification. Pass-rate trend analyses suggest that variation in the proportion of eligibility pathway cohorts in the respective testing samples explains some of the fluctuation in passing rates. An analysis of variance of domain-level scores, using groups defined by eligibility pathway, yielded significant differences for nearly all group comparisons. Evaluation of the effect sizes suggest that the most disparate performance was observed on the core clinical domain, Patient-Centered Care. The results of this study are consistent with previously published research and will inform the upcoming role delineation study for the Psychiatric Pharmacy Certification.

Informations de copyright

© 2021 CPNP. The Mental Health Clinician is a publication of the College of Psychiatric and Neurologic Pharmacists.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Disclosures: This work is sponsored solely by the Board of Pharmacy Specialties (BPS), an autonomous division of the American Pharmacists Association, of which Y.M. and W.E. are employees. T.M. and S.G.J. were previously employees of BPS. J.D. and K.G. are volunteer members (chair and vice-chair, respectively) of the Psychiatric Pharmacy Special Council, which establishes certification requirements and collaborates with BPS staff in the development of the Board Certified Psychiatric Pharmacy Examination. Reimbursement for other than occasional travel expenses (meals, lodging, transportation) is not made for this volunteer work. A PGY-2 Psychiatric Pharmacy Resident at J.D.'s institution was a recipient of a BPS PGY-2 Resident Seed grant in 2018. The seed grant funded the study: Do pharmacist employers prefer or require board certification? BPS had no role in any of the following for that study: development of study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of data, writing of the report, and decision to submit the article for publication. This present study falls under the BPS Research Protocol: Ongoing evaluation of pharmacist specialist board certification examination development activities; deemed exempt from IRB regulation.