Objective:Medical students need proper education in drug prescription. The aim of the present study is to introduce a course that improves the students' prescribing skills and also promotes an interprofessional collaboration between medicine and pharmacy schools.Methods:This study was done in a skill laboratory at the pharmacotherapy department of Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. The course was an 18-h interactive workshop in 3 days under the supervision of clinical pharmacists. A total of 18 medical students participated in these classes before their internship. Before and after each class, they were given tests and paired t-test was done to compare the marks.Findings:A total of 18 medical students participated in this study. The results showed that the knowledge of the students on pharmacotherapy, drug information, and prescribing skills has been significantly improved at the end of the course.Conclusion:Using clinical pharmacists to the present pharmacotherapy course could be an effective model for medical students to obtain better prescribing skills.
Introduction: Personal computers or laptops and smartphones has been used to change the lecture based traditional class to an interactive workshop to educate the knowledge and skills necessary for using drug information resources in clerkship courses. Methods: After the needs assessment and educational facilities, the appropriate drug information questions corresponding to each source were designed. Students used their laptops and smartphones to find the answer to drug information questions. The OSCE exam was taken at the end of the course to evaluate the skills obtained by the students. The scores of knowledge exam and OSCE skills exam of this group were compared with students of the previous period. The data were analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistic, Paired t-Test, and Pearson Correlation. Results: The mean scores of the knowledge exam compare to prior group increased significantly (6.79 ± 0.78 in group I, 9.96 ± 0.91 in Group II, P-value<0.01). Moreover, the OSCE exam scores (6.15 ± 0.88) improved significantly (P-value<0.05) in comparison to the scores of the previous traditional lecture-based classes (4.97 ± 0.73). Conclusion: Our method to train drug information resources by the using of laptop and smartphones could be an appropriate method to improve the quality of education, students' knowledge, and skills.
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