Integrating a New Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacology Course Sequence into the PharmD Curriculum

Abstract

Objective. To evaluate the implementation of an integrated medicinal chemistry/pharmacology course sequence and its alignment with a therapeutics series. Design. Each topic was divided into modules consisting of 2-hour blocks, and the content was integrated and aligned with the therapeutics series. Recitation sessions emphasizing application skills in an interactive environment followed each of three 2-hour blocks. To ensure that students achieved competency in each unit, students failing any unit examination were encouraged to undergo remediation. Assessment. Student feedback was collected by an independent researcher through social media and focus groups and relayed anonymously to course directors for midcourse improvements. Responses from surveys, interviews, and student ratings of faculty members and of courses were used to implement changes for future editions of the courses. Conclusion. The majority of students and faculty members felt the integration and alignment processes were beneficial changes to the curriculum. Elements of the new sequence, including remediation, were viewed positively by students and faculty members as well.

A systematic review to investigate student performance and their learning experiences within integrated healthcare curricula

“…The number of students experiencing the integrated educational activities was not always described, but where included, cohorts varied from relatively small, approximately 30-40, to very large, approximately 1000-2000 students. Most studies, (n=34) adopted surveys to capture student feedback [10,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][34][35][36][37][38][39][43][44][45][46][47][48][49], six studies employed student interviews or focus groups [11,12,27,29,36,37] and 24 assessed student performance at a terminal assessment [10,14,15,17,18,21,[23]…”

“…Where this was included, the goals most prominently related to the design of a student learning environment to improve active and self-directed learning [10,13,16,[18][19][20]46]. There was some focus on the desire to increase student knowledge development, specifically to improve knowledge integration across different disciplines [11,12,14,21,25,28,29,32,35,36,37,39,42,44], and to augment student skills development [10,16,17,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25]32,46] e.g. critical thinking, problem-solving, and clinical reasoning.…”

“…critical thinking, problem-solving, and clinical reasoning. Half of the studies (n=20) described activities at the interdisciplinary level of integration [12,13,[15][16][17][18]20,21,[23][24][25][27][28][29]31,35,37,[44][45][46] and eight described elements of, or a full curriculum, at the transdisciplinary level [10,11,22,[39][40][41]43,49]. Two studies described interventions at the correlation [26,32], and at the multidisciplinary levels [14,31], and one at the complementary level [42].…”

The Importance of Medicinal Chemistry Knowledge in the Clinical Pharmacist’s Education

“…Several papers published in this Journal reported on this topic. Khan and colleagues, 9 Alsharif and colleagues, 10 and Beleh and colleagues, 11 emphasized the importance of medicinal chemistry knowledge for pharmacy students. Moreover, this can be noted by the shift in classical textbooks of medicinal chemistry such as those by Lemke and colleagues, 2 and Currie and colleagues 12 that emphasize the clinical relevance of the discipline and which have been adopted by many medicinal chemistry courses around the world.…”

Performance on Interdisciplinary Topics in an Integrated Pharmacy Course

“…Corresponding author: Joie Rowles, PhD Midwestern University-Glendale jrowle@midwestern.edu Obstacles and challenges to curricular integration have been described. [3][4][5][6][7] Many faculty consider themselves as specialists in their chosen discipline and think first (and sometimes only) about that content when preparing lectures. The pharmacy curriculum, being founded on the sciences, is not naturally integrated and the different disciplines tend to separate out by both faculty and students.…”