Evaluation by Students’ Self-assessment of a Curriculum for Fifth-year Pharmacy Students to Integrate Basic Science and Clinical Knowledge

Abstract

The core curriculum of the pharmacy education model was revised in 2013 based on the “Basic competencies required of a pharmacist” that should be developed by graduation. Specific behavioral objectives to acquire include competency in “The ability to implement pharmacotherapeutic management”, which involves gaining the ability to understand patient information, prescription design and proposal, as well as pharmacotherapeutic assessment. In order to improve this ability, it is necessary for students to acquire basic knowledge about pathology, pharmacology, and pharmacotherapy and to integrate and apply this knowledge to patients in practice. We introduced an integrated program called “Integrated Clinical Pharmacy” for fifth-year students at Hokkaido Pharmaceutical University. In this program, students take an objective test on the basic knowledge of pathology, pharmacology, and pharmacotherapy and learn how to design pharmaceutical care plans using individual patient cases. A self-evaluation questionnaire survey about the ability to develop care plan was conducted on students who completed the program. Based on the objective test and self-evaluation questionnaire results, we studied whether basic knowledge was fully established and whether the ability to utilize this knowledge was acquired through this program. We found that although the ability to select an individual component of care plan did improve, this ability wasn’t correlated with the degree of basic knowledge, and performance in summarizing care plan did not improve. These results suggested that it is necessary to understand the connection between components of the care plan and strategies to focus on improving the ability to integrate basic knowledge.