PharmD Students Receive Bursary for IPPE and APPE Rotations

The College of Pharmacy and Nutrition is excited to announce that the Pharmacy EL Program has been awarded funding from CEWIL Canada to support work-integrated learning (WIL) in the form of clinical placements. Pharmacy students completing an Introductory Pharmacy Practice Experience (IPPE) or Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience (APPE) rotation between May 4 and December 18, 2026 are eligible to receive the one-time bursary. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada’s Innovative Work-Integrated Learning Initiative and CEWIL Canada’s iHUB.

“CEWIL Canada is pleased to support innovative WIL experiences for students at the University of Saskatchewan where students have been able to receive financial support and recognition for their WIL experience,” says Charlene Marion, Executive Director at CEWIL Canada.

Intentionally embedded throughout the PharmD program, EL purposefully engages learners in practical experiences, critical reflection, and authentic assessment in a variety of real-world practice settings. The Pharmacy EL Office arranges over 1000 practice experiences each year, from 3-hour introductory immersive visits in community pharmacies for Year 1 students, to 8-week elective rotations in non-traditional practice settings in Year 4. “It’s a massive undertaking to arrange placements each year. We work very hard at making as many students and practice sites as satisfied with their match as possible.”, said Taylor Raiche, Director of Pharmacy Experiential Learning.

“It’s important that we give students some agency to select where they would like to complete their rotations, so we ask for their preferences of location.”, said Raiche. “Saskatoon and Regina – what we consider our two urban communities – are most popular, but we always have a cohort of students who select rural communities as their top choice. Those are relatively easy matches. The pharmacists who offer to host students in those communities care deeply about showing students what it’s like to work in a smaller community where the pharmacist can really work to their full scope of practice in collaboration with other health professionals.”

Over 50% of the population in Saskatchewan lives outside of Saskatoon and Regina.¹ For residents of rural Saskatchewan, their local pharmacist is often the most accessible health professional. Pharmacies in rural areas are also instrumental in providing health care services to remote and Indigenous communities.² These practice sites are ripe with opportunity for pharmacy interns to develop cultural humility, problem solving, and other leadership and stewardship competencies.

Students are responsible for arranging their own accommodations and transportation once matched to a practice site. “It can be costly, and we completely empathize with that.”, Raiche acknowledges. In making the application to CEWIL Canada, she adds that she emphasized how helping reduce the financial challenges associated with EL might enable students to more readily focus on the learning experiences provided by the pharmacist preceptors who volunteer their space, time, energy, and mentorship in each rotation.

1. https://publications.saskatchewan.ca/api/v1/products/86690/formats/134031/download
2. Can Pharm J (Ott). 2023 Apr 10;156(3):112–114. doi: 10.1177/17151635231169606