The Department of Pharmacotherapy of Hiroshima University Hospital has been carrying out clinical training for pharmacy graduate students in primary care for outpatients in the Department of General Medicine. Recently, since pharmacists have frequently attended to outpatients for whom primary care is important, we developed software for students to learn the process of the examination and diagnosis of primary care outpatients and prescribing objectives. We also investigated the effectiveness of the software in pharmaceutical education for pharmacy students. In the development of the software, we improved a database of clinical cases used in training on primary care for outpatients.
The software covered 50 cases and 52 pharmacy students in the junior year at Hiroshima University Faculty of Medicine's Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences filled out a questionnaire on its usefulness in training. Eighty-three percent of the students considered the software to be useful and 58% said that software enhanced their desire to learn. The questionnaire responses also indicated that our concept of learning about the examination and diagnosis process and prescribing objectives using actual cases was well received by students. These results suggest that the software will be an effective new instruction tool and contribute much to pharmaceutical education.
