JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Background:

One of the roles of pharmacists in team care is to optimize pharmaceutical therapy. Pharmacists need to engage actively with physicians’ prescriptions to provide a better service. However, medical staff have few opportunities to learn about optimizing prescription proposals because they have to undertake various tasks.

Objective:

Objectives: To improve the quality of medical professional education, we designed and adopted a novel learning program of pharmacotherapy optimization for pharmaceutical students.

Methods:

Methods:

We recruited 191 pharmaceutical students during the 2022–2024 academic years. The learning program consisted of 1) learning prescription assist and clinical practice data, and 2) prescription assist role-playing for 7days. Students’ awareness and knowledge were assessed before and after the learning program by Web-based questionnaire and knowledge paper test.

Results:

Results:

Before and after the program implementation, 116 students were assessed for their awareness and 132 students were assessed for knowledge. At the end of the program, more than 50% of the students self-reported that they understood the meaning and importance of prescription assist by pharmacists. By contrast, the rates of above-average achievement in pharmacology and pharmacokinetics based on drug structure were low (9%–39%). In the knowledge assessment, the average total scores significantly increased after the intervention (before: 12.6, after: 14.3, P<0.01). The average scores for organic chemistry (before: 1.9, after: 2.3, P<0.01), pharmacology (before: 2.3, after: 3.2, P<0.01), and communication (before: 2.7, after: 3.0, P<0.01) also increased after the intervention in the domain-specific assessments.

Conclusions:

Conclusions:

Our program provides evidence that students’ practical learning about prescription proposals with hospital pharmacists helps improve pharmacists’ professional skills and optimize pharmaceutical therapies in medical teams.