mina khezrian

Medical students need proper education in drug prescription. The aim of the present study is to introduce a course that improves the students’ prescribing skills and also promotes an interprofessional collaboration between medicine and pharmacy schools.

This study was done in a skill laboratory at the pharmacotherapy department of Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. The course was an 18‑h interactive workshop in 3 days under the supervision of clinical pharmacists. A total of 18 medical students participated in these classes before their internship. Before and after each class, they were given tests and paired t‑test was done to compare the marks.

A total of 18 medical students participated in this study. The results showed that the knowledge of the students on pharmacotherapy, drug information, and prescribing skills has been significantly improved at the end of the course.

Using clinical pharmacists to the present pharmacotherapy course could be an effective model for medical students to obtain better prescribing skills.

Over 90% of pharmacy students’ work in pharmacies after graduation which needs both knowledge and skill, thus one of the most essential courses of their education is pharmacy clerkship. An important part of an educational program is the evaluation of the trainees. Different studies show that conventional written exams are not successful in evaluating the skills of the students and can mostly evaluate their knowledge. Thus Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is used to evaluate the students in different aspects. An OSCE and a conventional test were given to a group of students at the end of basic community pharmacy clerkship course. The OSCE test consisted of six different stations (reading prescriptions, identifying drugs, pharmacist’s recommendation, patient education, drug information resources, and drug usage instructions). Two questions were asked at each station by different examiners. The scores and results of these tests were compared and analyzed. There was no significant correlation between OSCE final scores and written test scores (P: = 0.217). No significant correlation between each station’s score and the written test score was found. The absence of significant correlation between OSCE and conventional exams shows that the skills evaluated by OSCE cannot be evaluated by the best possible written tests. This type of examination is not commonly used in Iran’s pharmacy schools but due to the findings of this study, it seems that this multiform method, despite being more difficult to arrange, can be a more suitable and relevant way to evaluate basic community pharmacy clerkship compared to conventional written tests.

Pharmacy education has been changed in recent years. Pharmacy students need more practical and clinical skills which come from direct interaction with patients and other health care providers. To achieve this, students need more effective courses and clerkships. In this paper we describe our method to design and evaluate clinical pharmacy clerkship for the first time in Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences (AJUMS). To determine the most beneficial way of education we designed a pilot study in educational hospital of AJUMS. After analyzing the conclusions from pilot study, 40 fifth year pharmacy student divided in ten groups and each group had a six week rotation in three different wards under supervision of medical residents. Each student was asked to provide evaluations during six total weeks of three different rotation sites. Clinical pharmacy clerkship led to successfully improved clinical skills for students such as being familiar with different practice environments, direct communication whit patients and medical team and participation in direct patient care activities. All the students participate in the course could pass the final exam and 85% of students believed this would be a necessary education course in their clerkship programs. Although there were some problems but pharmacy students benefited from this course and it gives them advantages in clinical knowledge and professional communication skills.