Abstract
This paper describes the design and implementation of a workshop to enhance pharmacy students’ appreciation of the importance of chemistry for pharmacy practice. The workshop was designed to form part of the practical work of two modules taught in the second year of the MPharm degree. In this mandatory workshop, second year pharmacy students were required to spot in the dispensary drugs based on their chemical properties like chirality, their origin and chemical structure. The lecturers involved in the workshop showed examples of the application of chemistry in the day to day work of the dispensary (e.g. calculating the dose for a patient in millimoles or how small modifications from a natural product can change its ability to cross the blood-brain-barrier). Feedback from participating students was collected via two survey instruments to examine the impact of the intervention. The survey results showed a clear shift towards a more positive perception by students of the chemistry taught in the MPharm curriculum.
Highlights
The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) is the independent regulator for pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pharmacy premises in Great Britain [1]
In order to address this knowledge gap, the authors of this paper created “The Chemistry of the Dispensary Workshop”, a workshop designed to form part of the practical work of two modules taught in the second year of the MPharm degree at the University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom (UK) (Pharmaceutical Chemistry II and Pharmacy Practice II), and incorporating other subjects taught in the MPharm degree including Microbiology, Pharmaceutics, Pharmacology and Pharmacognosy
The lead author of this paper is the module leader of Pharmaceutical Chemistry II which is taught in the second year, and is a practicing community pharmacist in the UK
Summary
The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) is the independent regulator for pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pharmacy premises in Great Britain [1]. The GPhC’s standards for the initial education and training of pharmacists [2] states that the curricula must be integrated and the component parts of education and training must be linked in a coherent way referencing the idea of the spiral curriculum [17] With this in mind, the third objective of the workshop was to try to show second year pharmacy students how the different subjects taught in the MPharm degree are inter-related. The fact that our workshop integrated different disciplines, which is a requirement of the GPhC [2], led us to consider that there was a clear need for the development of such a workshop as an original piece of educational research In this respect, this paper is innovative due to its focus on the practical application of chemistry knowledge to the real world, routine work of a community (retail) pharmacist. In this workshop we examined the impact of the workshop on student learning by administrating a questionnaire before and after the workshop
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