Many innovations have been made in the field of medical education in the past decades in Japan, however, until now it has been tempted to accept and respond to the international trends. We have to make it into the era of deepening and internalizing these trends. Updating the educational skills of medical teachers has so far largely depended on individual efforts. It is necessary to build a system to provide the basics of education and to support diverse careers of health professionals as educators. Regarding educational research, an excess of import has continued. We should support young researchers and disseminate the research outcomes to the world. Research questions such as “how to learn” and “how to teach” will be a start of educational research, and these will be accumulated and contribute to the advancement of health profession education. Medical education and pharmacy education have a “common language and culture”. Under the philosophy “all health professionals are educators”, I hope, both academic societies will act closely in cooperation.

Ten years have passed since six-year pharmaceutical education was introduced in 2006. As the environment surrounding pharmacists changes, further advancement in pharmaceutical education is expected. In this context, an increasing number of studies have been conducted to improve pharmaceutical education and practice, with an emphasis on not only quantitative but also qualitative research. The present paper introduces qualitative research based on content analysis and the Grounded Theory Approach (GTA) to assess pharmaceutical education programs and the professional skills of pharmacists, and discusses the characteristics of the qualitative research. Teachers involved in pharmaceutical education are required to focus on changes in health care environments, while paying attention to universal education required for pharmacists as specialists and their advancing professional skills, to exert their efforts to improve pharmaceutical education and maintain its quality. Therefore, they should discuss methods for educational approaches and assess the effects of pharmaceutical education on students to reflect the results of assessment in its improvement.

A questionnaire survey was conducted to clarify the current situation of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) education in schools of pharmacy in Japan. A total of 191 of 268 teaching staff from 72 schools completed the survey (71.3% response rate). Among 50 major EBM keywords, those concerning study design (randomized controlled trial, prospective cohort study, case-control study) and index of clinical trial data (odds/odds ratio, relative/absolute risk) were educated in almost all schools. On the other hand, keywords relevant to clinical inference, application of results of randomized controlled trials to patients, critical appraisal of systematic reviews, and development and interpretation of clinical practice guidelines were less educated. Only 32.2 percent of respondents self-assessed “fulfilling”. Challenges such as “time deficit”, “lack of exercise lesson and practical training”, “limited awareness and skills of teachers”, “lack of appropriate educational tools” were mentioned.

Pharmacy students need to understand the various problems experienced by the elderly and the physically handicapped, and cope with them appropriately. In order to enable pharmacy students to acquire such knowledge and skills efficiently, many pharmacy schools in Japan have provided the students with physically handicapped simulation program such as wheelchair experiences, virtual experiences of the elderly, and so on. At Osaka University, we have provided our students similar physically handicapped simulation program with the cooperation of the Department of Nursing. However, in the real world, support for these patients is provided by nurses or healthcare workers, and not directly by pharmacists. Therefore, we implemented a newly designed physically handicapped simulation program since 2014. This program was targeted at first grade students in six-year and four-year courses. Considering typical cases where the elderly or the physically handicapped patients found difficulty regarding medication, we set up four situations: hemiplegia, visual impairment, swallowing disturbances, and speech impairments. The students filled out questionnaires for each situation. Regardless of whether students were enrolled in the six-year or four-year course, many answered that they became aware of what were important for the elderly or the physically handicapped to take medicine through the new popular program. We would like to make the program more attractive one from now on.

One of the critical roles of pharmacists is to avoid incidents related to adverse effects of drugs. Third-year students observed the adverse effects of propranolol using a PC installed with instructor soft-ware for the high-performance patient simulator, SimMan 3G. They administered propranolol on the PC to SimMan 3G, which was in a state of asthmatic attack (medium grade), and then monitored cardiac and respiratory parameters. We assessed their scores they obtained pre-test and post-test, and additionally analyzed the reports of the performance. Their scores of post-test were significantly higher than the pre-test scores. Sixty-eight percent of them said that propranolol was contraindicated for asthmatic attack, or that asthmatic attack was aggravated by propranolol. Forty percent of them correctly described the hypotensive mechanisms of propranolol based on their observations. The present report demonstrated that the instructor software for SimMan 3G is a good tool for learning about adverse effects of beta-blockers in a large class.

In Japan, the demand for self-care is increasing, and has come to include demands for greater amounts of OTC drugs to reduce medical expenses. Accordingly, we need to develop and incorporate OTC drugs practices in Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experiences (APPE), which at present do not sufficiently cover OTC drugs. To clarify the current issues with OTC drugs practice and to propose plans for improvement, we conducted questionnaire surveys of 159 students who experienced APPE and of 158 community pharmacists in the 2015 school year. A total of 46% of students were satisfied about OTC drugs practices in APPE, and said that “experiencing sales” gave them the most satisfaction, as well as “roleplay & observation”. More than 80% of community pharmacists answered that they had difficulties in APPE regarding OTC drugs. The largest problem for achieving SBOs for OTC drugs is that there are fewer opportunities to sell them. Additionally, community pharmacists felt that students lacked communication skills. This survey thus showed the necessity of learning communication skills, as well as improving skill and knowledge of OTC drugs, before beginning APPE at university. To accomplish this, students should experience sales as much as possible, and where this is not possible, they should engage in roleplay and observation. These OTC drugs practices were identified as giving students high satisfaction and can contribute to improving OTC drugs practices.

The physical assessment of vital signs and related parameters has recently been introduced into the curriculum of many pharmacy schools throughout Japan. To utilize the acquired skills in actual clinical settings, an accurate clinical assessment of a patient’s condition is essential. In the present study, pharmacy and medical students completed for the first time a Basic Physiology of Vital Signs (BPVS) program, which is a basic-level course in the Clinical Physiology of Vital Signs program developed for medical residency, and the educational outcomes among students were evaluated. Both groups of students acquired in repeated trials the ability to perform collection, handling, and evaluation of clinical information in a limited time while considering various clinical priorities based on their developing knowledge. This finding suggests that the BPVS program is an effective learning method for pharmacy and medical students that facilitates clinical diagnosis.

Pharmacy students are considered to experience various forms of stress during their pharmacy rotation, which is a part of the six-year pharmacy education. In the present study, a questionnaire measuring stress was administered to 108 sixth-year students. These students had completed their practicum experience at hospitals and pharmacies. Results indicated that most students experienced stress related to communication skills. In addition, there was difference between male and female students, and female students tended to receive a stress. Therefore, it is important that university faculty members and preceptors should understand the levels of students’ stress, and students’ mental health.

A flipped-type classroom was tried in a chemistry class attended by a small number of freshmen students. The students were given homework assignments two weeks prior to each lecture. The relevant lecture was then presented after the students’ marked homework was returned. In the classroom, the professor shared the individual learning situation with each student. A Rubric was applied to a self-evaluation of student performance, and a Student-Problem (S-P) score table analysis was used to evaluate the students’ progress in learning and to establish the validity of the examination questions. In contrast to conventional preparations, which do not depend on student autonomy, assigning exercises as homework before class was viewed as a way to motivate students to prepare independently. Assigning exercises before class is also different from the so-called flipped classroom where students exercise in class after receiving the lecture by video. A characteristic of the flipped-type classroom is that lectures can be prepared according to students’ individual understanding levels, in contrast to conventional classes. The Rubric and the S-P score table analysis were able to support this class through evaluation of students and examination questions.

A flipped-type classroom was tried in a chemistry class attended by a small number of freshmen students. The students were given homework assignments two weeks prior to each lecture. The relevant lecture was then presented after the students’ marked homework was returned. A Rubric was applied to a self-evaluation of student performance. For students in year 2012–2015, the difference and ratio of deviation values between examinations administered before and after the trial classroom were compared to the standard classroom. No significant difference was found. However, the probability of students in the trial classroom having to repeat the year was significantly lower than for students in the standard classroom, especially in cases where the difference in deviation values and the ratio of deviation values were relatively small. Rubric self-evaluation for the homework was significantly related to the deviation values for the examinations, but not significantly related to the difference or ratio of the deviation values.

Recently, there has been a need for high-quality research by pharmacists, but there are many problems with this activity. Since 2015, we have introduced an originally developed report on the progress of clinical research and have established a laboratory conference at Department of Pharmacy, Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital. Pharmacists revise the significance and direction of the theme by writing an article on the report, along with corrections, and the collaborators discuss the data at the conference. We then evaluated the need for the report and the conference by providing a questionnaire to pharmacists. They indicated each item of the report was almost necessary. The correspondents also indicated that they understood the necessity of both the report and the conference, as it allowed them to clarify their thoughts. After the introduction of the report and laboratory conference, a number of the academic conference presentations remained the same, but there was an increase in presentations on papers on the same theme. We expect that the introduction of the report on the progress of research and laboratory conference might lead to progress in the quality of research by pharmacists.

We conducted a trial of a new integrated cross-field pharmaceutical seminar, including basic pharmaceutical sciences and clinical pharmaceutical sciences, as team-based learning (TBL) (readiness checks: individual readiness assurance test (iRAT), team readiness assurance test (tRAT), and feedback) for the senior college students at Kobe Pharmaceutical University. We made 6 test interplicinary questions for the readiness assurance test. On the trial day, the students signed up for iRAT, tRAT with scratch cards, feedback, questionnaires, and peer reviews online. Analysis of test scores demonstrated that tRAT scores for each question and each team correlated with their average iRAT marks. However, peer reviews did not correlate with their own self reviews. After questionnaire totaling, 86%, 100%, and 95% of the students answered that the trial was useful for finding relationships between the subjects, tRAT was valuable for deepening their understandings, and they hope to participate in such TBL seminars as college seniors, respectively. These findings suggest that an integrated cross-field pharmaceutical seminar as TBL for college seniors can be carried out and is worth holding at pharmaceutical universities.