The understanding of core pharmacological concepts among health care students in their final semester.

BACKGROUND: The overall aim of the study was to explore health care students´ understanding of core concepts in pharmacology. METHOD: An interview study was conducted among twelve students in their final semester of the medical program (n = 4), the nursing program (n = 4), and the specialist nursing program in primary health care (n = 4) from two Swedish universities. The participants were individually presented with two pharmacological clinically relevant written patient cases, which they were to analyze and propose a solution to. Participants were allowed to use the Swedish national drug formulary. Immediately thereafter the students were interviewed about their assessments. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. A thematic analysis was used to identify units of meaning in each interview. The units were organized into three clusters: pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, and drug interactions. Subsequent procedure consisted of scoring the quality of students´ understanding of core concepts. Non-parametric statistics were employed. RESULTS: The study participants were in general able to define pharmacological concepts, but showed less ability to discuss the meaning of the concepts in depth and to implement these in a clinical context. The participants found it easier to grasp concepts related to pharmacodynamics than pharmacokinetics and drug interactions. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that education aiming to prepare future health care professionals for understanding of more complex pharmacological reasoning and decision-making needs to be more focused and effective.

On the pedagogy of pharmacological communication: a study of final semester health science students.

BACKGROUND: There is a need to improve design in educational programmes for the health sciences in general and in pharmacology specifically. The objective of this study was to investigate and problematize pharmacological communication in educational programmes for the health sciences. METHODS: An interview study was carried out where final semester students from programmes for the medical, nursing and specialist nursing in primary health care professions were asked to discuss the pharmacological aspects of two written case descriptions of the kind they would meet in their everyday work. The study focused on the communication they envisaged taking place on the concerns the patients were voicing, in terms of two features: how communication would take place and what would be the content of the communication. A phenomenographic research approach was used. RESULTS: The results are presented as outcome spaces, sets of categories that describe the variation of ways in which the students voiced their understanding of communication in the two case descriptions and showed the qualitatively distinct ways in which the features of communication were experienced. CONCLUSIONS: The results offer a base of understanding the students' perspectives on communication that they will take with them into their professional lives. We indicate that there is room for strengthening communication skills in the field of pharmacology, integrating them into programmes of education, by more widely implementing a problem-based, a case-oriented or role-playing pedagogy where final year students work across specialisations and there is a deliberate effort to evoke and assess advanced conceptions and skills.