This Virtual patients have been used since the 1990's in pharmacy education for teaching and assessment of clinical and communication skills. Although their use is still limited, they allow students' engagement in true-to-life situations in a controllable environment. This paper describes an interactive application to assist in the academic training and assessment of Pharmaceutical Sciences students. Virtual humans play the role of patients and communicate with the student by speech and by facial and body language. The application comprises two usage modes: (i) the training mode, used autonomously by the student, gives detailed information about his performance and indicates places where he may find additional information, and (ii) the assessment mode which is used by the teacher to evaluate the student's performance. The process used to feed case-scenarios in the application does not require informatics skills because it resorts to an easy-to-use graphical interface. A BackOffice Web application was implemented to allow the creation of new self-medication situations and the collection of data about students' performance. The application was tested by a restricted group of experts whose overall opinion was quite positive about the usefulness of the application as a tool to improve students' as well as professionals' communication skills.

MS/MS and HRMS experiments were able to elucidate azidoacetic acid complexation with Ni/Co/Fe and several gas-phase processes involving metal reduction and rearrangements. The definition of the coordination pattern dictated by the competition between the nitrogen and the oxygen atoms is also dependent on the metal centre in a very dynamic process. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Electron ionisation mass spectrometry studies were performed previously for p-diphenyl carbonate and some monosubstituted diphenyl carbonates. In this work, p-diphenyl carbonate and p-methoxyphenylphenyl carbonate are re-examined, and p-chlorophenyl phenyl carbonate and two disubstituted diphenyl carbonates, bis (p-chlorophenyl) carbonate and p-methoxyphenyl-p-fluorophenyl carbonate, are studied for the first time. The previously established fragmentation routes were observed for all compounds investigated. Some other different sequences were observed, and a fragmentation path, other than decarboxylation, of the molecular ion is proposed. In the fast-atom bombardment study it was observed that the M(+*)/[MH](+) ion abundance ratio increased from 0.44 for compound 1 to 2.95 for compound 5. [MH](+) is not a dominant ion in most of compounds studied, in spite of the presence of a carbonyl group, a strong proton acceptor. The presence of two oxygen atoms bonded to the carbonyl group appears to induce delocalisation of the electron pairs, thus deactivating the carbonyl site for protonation. In addition, m-nitrobenzyl alcohol (NBA) being a relatively aprotic/hydrophobic matrix reinforces the deactivation for protonation. Because the carbonate group and NBA are common features to the study, the contributions of the substituents were taken into account to explain the different behaviour of the five compounds with respect to protonation.

ABSTRACTi) an interactive application conceived to improve non-prescription medicines consultation skills in undergraduate Pharmacy students and ii) a user test carried out with two sets of participants.

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