Objective: Pharmaceutical chemistry plays a key role in pharmaceutical speciality, which is aiming at making students master basic concepts, basic theory and basic skills of pharmaceutical chemistry. The teachers, however, often encounter some challenges in their teaching process, such as insufficient learning motivation for students, lack of effective means to achieve teaching goals, non-uniformity of program outcomes and ability to satisfy industry needs. It is necessary to seek for an efficient way to improve teaching level by applying new mode. Methods: In view of the great success of Problem Based Learning (PBL) mode in medical courses, this mode is also attempted in pharmaceutical chemistry. We applied PBL method in teaching of pharmaceutical chemistry with the procedure as follows: Under the guidance of teachers, students carry out an active learning around the core knowledge or problem in each module, undergoing a logic process of "asking questions, establishing hypothesis, self-study to disambiguation, demonstrating hypothesis" to acquire knowledge. Results: Well-design of curriculum program and reasonable setting up of assessment system are both emphasized in teaching reform. Through teaching reform of PBL mode in pharmaceutical chemistry, complicated materials are easily to understand and basic knowledge is easily connected to practice. In addition, students' enthusiasm of autonomous learning is inspired and good teaching effects are found. Conclusion: Only more efforts in teaching practice in pharmaceutical chemistry are unceasingly made, will the goal of teaching reform with PBL method be achieved.

Introduction: Higher pharmaceutical education in China has made a great development in recent years. A few problems, such as unevenness of school-running level, lack of students innovation and deficiency of teaching effect, are also exposed in its rapid development. The reasons for these challenges are also revealed that old teaching mode and increasing enrollment scale in China's university may be the primary causes. Methods: To face these problems, some measures should be taken. Total quality management (TQM), as a novel teaching concept, is proposed in this article to integrate into higher pharmaceutical education in China. Results: To implement TQM, suggestions are given to emphasize on professional ethics, course quality and practice teaching. Firstly, the educators should take phar macy moral as one of the important contents and infiltrate it in all teaching activities so as to realize the cultivation of professional ethics. In addition, in order to improve course quality, it is necessary to implement curriculum reform by broadening curriculum caliber, optimizing curriculum system and removing regional segmentation in professional courses. What's more, practice teaching should be actively adopted to combine itself with higher pharmaceutical education in China due to it being a discipline depending largely on the practice. Conclusion: It is necessary to boost the TQM step by step within a healthy system, which will play an important role in improving the quality of pharmaceutical education. Though implementation of TQM in higher pharmaceutical education faces various opportunity and challenge, the philosophy of TQM will be gradually accepted by more and more universities.