In order to enable students to efficiently utilize their clinical clerkships and ultimately develop proper prescribing skills, Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy (P&PT) education in the bachelors has to optimized. For this, a thorough evaluation of P&PT teaching is needed, based on which teaching can be improved in the future.

Introduction

The goal of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy (P&PT) education at the medical faculty is to prepare future doctors to safely prescribe medicines. It is however known that medical students often feel unprepared while prescribing drugs during the clinical clerkships, leading to errors in prescriptions later during their practice .

The bachelor phase of the medical curriculum provides students with a theoretical basis essential for clinical clerkships. However, besides summative examinations, there are no other means to concretely examine whether students have achieved their learning goals. Interestingly standard course-evaluations focus predominantly on teaching delivery rather than reflection on one’s learning habits, the achieved learning goals and self-motivation. The feedback obtained from such questionnaires is often sub-optimal to trigger major curricular changes.

Aim and research question

The current research was conducted to thoroughly evaluate of the P&PT teaching in the bachelors in order to identify its strengths and weaknesses. The aim was to study whether current teaching methods sufficiently support students in achieving their learning goals.

Set-up and method

A 40-point questionnaire incorporating elements of the theory of constructive alignment and the self motivation theory was divided into 4 subparts, each addressing a separate domain. The questionnaire consisted of the following subparts:

• A) How motivated are the students to study P&PT?
• B) How do students rate their level of competence in various P&PT topics?
• C) Does the current form of examination sufficiently test student knowledge?
• D) To what extent are the teaching methods and educational tools considered useful and used by the student?

Participants were requested to indicate the extent of (dis)agreement for statements based on a 7-point Likert scale. The research was approved by the Dutch society for Medical Education (NVMO). In the pilot phase, thirty third year medical students were invited to fill in the questionnaire.

(Preliminary) Results

The response rate for the entire questionnaire was 25% (9) for all parts and 90% (17) for part A. The Cronbach alpha for the questionnaire was 0.88. The majority of students understood the importance of P&PT for their profession, enjoyed and found the subject interesting. However, a substantial percentage of students indicated not to prepare themselves prior to P&FT class; but doing so before examinations. The majority of students favored small tutorials to large groups and indicated a need for practice tests and interdisciplinary F&FT lessons.

Conclusion

Despite the limited number of participants, the pilot phase helped in gaining insight into student perception in this representative student population. Even though students enjoy P&PT education, a substantial part of the students engage in passive learning methods which might lead to poor knowledge retention in the longer term . The pilot phase of the study contributed to the validation of the questionnaire in a representative population. The survey will be further distributed in a larger group of students. As a subsequent step, a focus group with students will be created for further input on specific topics. Based on these results, the pharmacology curriculum will be gradually revised.

References

• Brinkman, D. J. et al. Do final-year medical students have sufficient prescribing
  competencies? A systematic literature review. Br. J. Clin. Pharmacol. 84, 615–635 (2018).
• Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K. & Kestin, G. Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 1–7 (2019) doi:10.1073/pnas.1821936116.