The Bachelor of Pharmacy program has become the first at the American University of Iraq-Baghdad (AUIB) to attain pre-accreditation by an esteemed international organization, the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), buttressing the standing of AUIB’s College of Pharmacy (CoP) and opening up new horizons in the job market before its students, both locally and internationally.
ACPE, the foremost American accreditation organization on the international stage in the field of Pharmacy, affirmed that AUIB’s Bachelor of Pharmacy program has received “International Pre-accreditation” status, announced the Dean of AUIB’s CoP, Dr. Achraf Al Faraj, who was keen to disambiguate the confusion between accreditation and recognition: “The entirety of AUIB, in all of its programs, is recognized locally and internationally,” whereas accreditation means that the quality of education and the learning outcomes gained by graduates of AUIB’s CoP are equivalent to those gained by the graduates of peer colleges that are ACPE accredited, be they in the United States or anywhere else in the world. This inspires confidence in the degree held by AUIB’s CoP graduates, said the Dean, pointing out that pre-accreditation was attained after a two-year-long effort, and that full accreditation will be achieved after the College has graduated its first cohort of students, approximately a year and a half from now.
What distinguish AUIB’s CoP from its peers in Iraq, according to Dr. Al Faraj, are the experiences gained by its students at hands-on training at the College’s laboratories, and later on at pharmaceutical factories and at clinical practice at hospitals, in addition to the general knowledge and soft skills learnt by virtue of the liberal-arts-based educational model, built on the fashion of American higher education institutions. The Pharmacy program at AUIB differs from its peer programs in Iraq by its unique design which merges the American and Iraqi pharmacy programs, said the Dean, explaining that after the first two academic years of studying basic sciences and core liberal arts courses, students commence their specialized studies for three professional academic years, during which they engage in practical application of their studies, which in turn helps them decide which sub-track within the pharmacy program they will take: Clinical Pharmacy or Industrial Pharmacy.