Changing strategies in teaching pharmacology to nursing, physiotherapy and dietetics undergraduates.

C Mestres, M Duran. Faculty of Health Sciences.Universitat Ramon LLull, Pharmacology, Spain

Pharmacology is usually a hard matter for our students, with high degrees of failure. Improving results, increase students interest and to adapt the programmes contents to the different needs of the future professions of our students, are some of the challenges we face.

In the past, we have already addressed some of these issues, such as adapting the programmes for the different curricula. Therefore, we have very diverse orientations of Pharmacology depending on the studies (for example: drug dosage calculation for nursing, interactions between pharmacological and physiotherapy treatments for physiotherapy students and drug-food interactions in dietetics studies)

The implementation of the Bologna Plan during last semester 2010 and first 2011, made possible a more drastic restructuration of the ways of teaching as well as the application of new strategies. Some of these have been:

• - Online management of the Pharmacology courses, through an informatics’ application (Moodle). Thus includes: general information about the course, PowerPoint presentations, links, documents for reading and completing lectures, auto evaluation test.
• - Workshops with small groups of students. This makes possible to address issues such as: management of simulated real cases, clinical cases, how to obtain drug information, etc. All the material is tailored for the different studies as stated before for the courses programmes.
• - Continuous evaluation. Besides final exam, online activities and workshops results contribute to the final mark of the student.

All this has made the students more aware of the role that Pharmacology will play in their future profession, in what situations it will be present and have some insight of how to manage them. Moreover, there have been an increase (between 5- 30%) in the number of students that have passed in the three courses (nursing, physiotherapy and dietetics); compared with those we have had so far in near twenty years of teaching pharmacology.