Research Project Description:

Reducing medication errors remains a significant challenge. Medication errors compromise patient safety and significantly increase health care costs. An important contributor to medication errors is irrational prescribing, which may stem, at least partly, from a poor understanding of pharmacology. Indeed, it remains a challenge for educators to prepare medical students to become effective and safe prescribers. Problem-based learning (PBL) has been introduced to counteract the limitations of traditional, passive teaching in medical education disciplines, including pharmacology. However, there is a lack of high-quality studies that address the effectiveness of pharmacology teaching in an integrated PBL-based curriculum. Furthermore, it is currently not known which students may benefit or detriment from learning pharmacology in a PBL-based curriculum. The diverse student characteristics that may impact learning include age, gender, previous experience with PBL, ethnicity, educational background, language, academic ability, learning style and approach to learning. The current proposal is thus aimed at investigating whether a PBL based pharmacology curriculum is able to satisfy the aforementioned diverse learning needs of medical students in pre-clinical years and contribute to the development of prescribing skills in clinical years. Effectiveness of PBL in addressing diverse learning needs will be evaluated based on two outcomes in first, second and fourth (final) year medical students. Firstly, reliable assessments will elucidate the effects of student differences on achieving learning outcomes. Secondly, questionnaires will be developed and validated to assess the satisfaction of learners with PBL-based pharmacology. Statistical analysis will elucidate student characteristics that may impact pharmacology learning. The findings will help identify students who are ‘under-served’ by the current educational approach. The findings will subsequently inform changes to the curriculum to better support student learning.

Principal Investigator(s) and Coordinating Institution(s):

  • Dr Persoulla Nicolaou, University of Nicosia Research Foundation (UNRF)

 Researchers at University of Nicosia

  • Dr Persoulla Nicolaou
  • Prof Alexia Papageorgiou
  • Prof Peter McCrorie
  • Dr Stella Nicolaou
  • Dr Ioulia Televantou

UNIC Participating Institution:

  • University of Nicosia Research Foundation (UNRF)

Other Participating Institution(s):

  • UK (St George’s, University of London)

 Research Project Acronym: PharmPBL

Funding Agency:Research and Innovation Foundation (RIF)

Funding Programme: Excellence Hubs

Total Research Project Budget: €146,066

Research Project Status: Completed

Start and End Dates: 02 October 2019 – 31 January 2022

Funding Programme or Research Project Logo:

Related Links:

* Related Conference Participations:

  1. Televantou I., Albert A., Hitchings A., Nicolaou S., Papageorgiou A., McCrorie P. & Nicolaou P. (2021). The effect of pharmacology teaching on diverse learners in a problem-based learning (PBL) medical curriculum. In International Conference on Medical Education, April 2021 (Oral presentation, ‘Best presentation’ award for themed session).
  2. Nicolaou, S., Papageorgiou, A., Televantou, I., McCrorie, P., Albert, A., Hitchings, A., & Nicolaou, P. (2021). Students’ perceptions and satisfaction with pharmacology teaching in a problem-based learning medical curriculum. In AMEE August, 2021