Abstract
We conducted a training program to enhance pharmacy students’ awareness of the importance of medicinal education for children as part of the students’ professional training curriculum at a pharmacy school. In this study, we investigated students’ levels of knowledge of medicinal education before entering university to study pharmacy and evaluated the cognitive changes that took place after they undertook the training program as well as their satisfaction with and their opinions of the usefulness of the training. The program consisted of preparing medicinal education materials and conducting a trial class using the materials prepared. A questionnaire was distributed to 111 pharmacy students who participated in the training program in 2009, and the responses in 107 fully completed questionnaires were analyzed.
Twenty-nine out of the 107 evaluable respondents had had some previous experience in the field of medicinal education (27.1%). Before the training program, 25 of these 29 students (86.2%) and 34 of the 78 students who had had no such experience (43.6%) selected “strongly agree” or “agree” as their response to the statement “medicinal education is necessary for children” while after the training, the response rates for these 2 groups were 86.2% and 85.9%, respectively. The training program also enhanced the students’ interest in medicinal education regardless of their previous experience of it. In addition, 100% of the students responded that the training program was “very useful”, “useful”, or “slightly useful” and 95.3% indicated satisfaction with it. These findings suggest that the training program was useful in increasing the students’ awareness of the importance of medicinal education for children.
