Focus of societal responsibility in the vision and mission statements of the United States pharmacy schools/ colleges

Objective: To assess the prevalence of societal responsibility languages and themes on education, research, and professional service in pharmacy programmes’ vision and mission statements. Methods: The authors collected the vision and mission statements of 142 pharmacy programmes by visiting each programme’s website. The statements were compiled and uploaded in NVivo 12. Deductive qualitative analysis and a topic extraction method with embedded principal component analysis (WordStat 8) were used to identify thematic dimensions of the statements. The number of programmes citing the respective themes were recorded. A Chi-square test was used to statistically analyse the prevalence of themes between the programme categories. Results: Education, research, professional practice, and societal service emerged as prominent themes. The prevalence of research, professional practice, and leadership themes was significantly higher in the vision statements of public programmes than private programmes. In the mission statements, the citation of a research theme was significantly higher in public programmes than private programmes. The citations of serving the diverse population and underserved population were very limited in the vision (6% and 5%) and mission statements (11% and 6%). Topic analysis conformed to the identified prominent themes and lack of societal responsibility theme in the mission statements. Conclusions: The prominent themes included education, research, and professional service to society at large. There is a distinctive lack of citations of societal responsibility towards underserved populations in the vision and mission statements.