[Practical pharmacotherapy education "pharmacology role-play": expansion and ingenuity in Medical, Dental, Pharmaceutical and Nursing education.]

Active learning in pharmacology education "pharmacology role-play," in which students pretend to be health professionals and patients and explain diseases and drug treatments. Because pharmacology role-play is based on cases presented in advance and active learning through communication, named Case & Communication based approach (C&C approach). Pharmacology role-play was started in 2010 at the University of Miyazaki, it has been shared by 28 schools in 4 faculties of medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, and nursing (23 medical schools, 1 pharmaceutical school, 2 dental schools, and 2 nursing universities) over the 13 years until 2022. Although it is a common program, it is implemented with diversity while devoting various ingenuity according to the characteristics of the University. Pharmacology role-play is effective in (1) understanding of medical treatment, (2) understanding patient's feelings, (3) improvement of mental attitude and motivation as health professionals (4) positive influence upon study attitude, regardless of universities that conducted the pharmacology role-play. Various efforts include combining with Personal Drugs, developing interprofessional education through joint role-playing by medical students and nursing students, and developing Oriental medicine education through the cases including Kampo medicine. In addition, there are online lectures in response to the Covid-19, and a joint implementation of two universities, all of which are highly effective. The advantage of the multi-institution common program is that a lot of information can be obtained at once, and it is easy to quickly reflect successful ideas. The flexibility and high resilience that can flexibly change the implementation method (face-to-face/remote) according to the situation are also great strengths.

[Practices and challenges of joint education at two medical schools utilizing online pharmacology role-playing].

The pharmacology role-play, in which students impersonate medical personnel and patients to explain illness and drug treatment, is one of the active learning of pharmacology. However, until now, it has been carried out only within one facility, and has not been carried out between different multi-facility facilities with a larger scale. However, the spread of COVID-19 infection in 2020 was a turning point that drastically changed the way of medical school education centered on traditional face-to-face lectures. Above all, remote real-time lessons using Zoom etc. have the advantage that about 300 students can be conducted at multiple facilities without having to gather them in one place at the same time. With the Korona-ka as a strange currency, the infrastructure has been set up to carry out joint education in pharmacological role-playing between different multi-institutions. We are the first in Japan to conduct a pharmacology role-play jointly by Fujita Medical University and Aichi Medical University, so we would like to introduce the contents.

[The development of online role-play for pharmacological education].

The role-play for pharmacological education has been developed by Yanagita et al. since 2010 and incorporated into the curriculum of more than 20 medical or pharmaceutical universities in Japan. This case and communication based active learning course provides the practice to acqire fundamental competences for drug therapy, through role playing of medical professionals and patients in simulated clinical settings. The online pharmacological role-play for the first time was performed at Tohoku Medical and Pharmaceutical University Faculty of Medicine during the state of emergency in Japan. We found that the online role-play was as useful as face-to-face role-plays to train appropriate drug prescriptions and communication skills in medical students. In this review, we described the course design, preparation, and operation of online role-play for pharmacological education. We also explained the differences, advantages, and disadvantages between online and face-to-face setting. Finally, we gave examples on-going challenges to the effective use of the online role-play as a core curricular model of pharmacological and pharmacotherapeutic education.