Research Project Description:

Reducing medication errors, which compromise patient safety and increase healthcare costs, remains a significant challenge. An important contributor to medication errors is irrational prescribing, which may stem from a poor understanding of pharmacology. 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 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 and it is currently not known which students may benefit or detriment from this approach. Our recent findings, from two different cohorts of students, elucidated the factors, which facilitated the learning of pharmacology in such a curriculum in pre-clinical years, including a background in biomedical sciences and baseline pharmacology knowledge. Furthermore, qualitative data from focus groups and interviews identified four major themes that impact learning, namely 1) PBL as a learning environment; 2) PBL as a learning environment in Pharmacology; 3) PBL as a learning environment and confidence in prescribing and 4) The curriculum in relation to pharmacology. Finally, our results from a satisfaction and perceptions questionnaire we developed, have provided further insight into the student learning experience. As part of the current proposal, we will follow both cohorts of students in their final year to investigate whether the factors, which facilitated learning in pre-clinical years impact the development of prescribing skills in clinical years by comparing the performance of students on the prescribing safety assessment and assessing student satisfaction. Statistical analysis will reveal the student groups who benefited or were disadvantaged in the development of prescribing skills. Our findings will allow evidence-based curriculum changes, which may ultimately improve the learning of pharmacology and contribute to the reduction of medication errors.

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

  • Dr Persoulla Nicolaou, University of Nicosia Medical School, Cyprus

Researchers at University of Nicosia Medical School:

  • Prof Peter McCrorie
  • Prof Alexia Papageorgiou
  • Dr Stella Nicolaou

**Other Researcher(s) Participating in the Project:

  • Prof Anthony Albert
  • Dr Andrew Hitchings
  • Dr Ioulia Televantou

Research Project Acronym: ClinPharmPBL

Funding Institution: University of Nicosia Medical School

Funding Programme: 2022 Call of the University of Nicosia Medical School Research Seed Fund

Research Project Status: Ongoing

Start and End Dates: 01 October 2022 – 01 October 2024