It is here. All of the hard work has paid off and many of you are finishing or have finished your final rotations and even graduated. Congratulations!

But...before you can become a pharmacist and change practice there is this examination you have to pass known as the NAPLEX. I've spent the last two weeks teaching virtually countless hours at various schools of pharmacy to help prepare their students for success. A few of these points I wanted to share with you today as you prepare:

1. It isn't too late. I know...you thought you would start preparing in May of last year. Then you decided to start after summer. Then after Christmas break. And now we are here. If you focus now, you can still successfully study well for the exam to pass. How do I do that? 

AccessPharmacy has a number of great resources for studying. As the Associate Editor of the NAPLEX 3rd edition textbook, we geared the textbook chapters to be read in 10 minutes or less because we know students don't read long chapters and you need to be able to know the main issues to study. 

Additionally, this Question of the Week feature has been going for nearly a year and a half, so feel free to go back and practice these questions. 

2. Practice Questions are a must. There are a number of resources out there. AccessPharmacy has thousands of practice questions for you to go through in the NAPLEX 3rd edition textbook as well as the NAPLEX Question Online Question Bank. Both of these are located in the Naplex Central tab at the top of the opening AccessPharmacy page. In the textbook, you can practice randomized question or focus on a specific disease state, such as oncology or HIV (I know...those are hard). In the online question bank, you can practice questions based on NAPLEX competency statements. Do you know what these are? If not here is a recently updated link: https://nabp.pharmacy/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NAPLEX-Competency-Statement-Sample-Questions.pdf

What separates this products questions from others is this: You can benchmark yourself versus all users of AccessPharmacy nationally and internationally. Once you answer a question, you can see what % of folks got that question correct. That will provide some insight on what topics you may need to go back and emphasize.

3. Hit calculations hard. Calculations are going to be on the exam. During your rotations, you may have had some kinetics and TPN but possibly not much outside of that. Additionally the NAPLEX competency sample questions show that calculations could show up as fill in the blank or as they term it "constructed response" so unlike the other question types which are recognition, this one you have to generate the answer from scratch. In order to knock off the rust, do a lot of calculation problems and work them all the way through. 

Again congratulations on earning your Doctorate of Pharmacy. Now for the last step!

Dr. B