The use of art to analyze learning practices in pharmacy and to inform assessment and intervention practices

Abstract

First paragraph: It has been argued in the literature that pharmacy is an integration of art and science with, for example, authors describing the “art and science” of counseling patients. Similar wide-ranging discussion exists in the literature around other health professions, including medicine and nursing, with debate extending back for decades. Authors argue that successful practice as a health professional requires an entwining of both the “so-called ‘soft,’ co-creative, relationship-building art, and ‘hard,’ linear, controlling science” which have been separated in health care recently. Panda posits that the doctor needs to be “an artist armed with basic scientific knowledge in medicine,” which requires a combination of emotion and intuition alongside employing rational analysis. Convention tries to distinguish between the “artist” and the “scientist,” and it is argued that there is a “confused notion that one uses emotion and intuition, drawing support from inward genius, achieving great effects without knowing how or why, but that the other, employing rational analysis, is cold and precise, analytical and detached, surrounded by highly complex instruments that baffle the lay mind.”