A comparison of medical and pharmacy students' knowledge and skills of pharmacology and pharmacotherapy

We commend Keijsers and colleagues on their comparison of basic and clinical pharmacology and pharmacotherapy skills in medical and pharmacy students 1. Their finding that pharmacy students outperformed medical students with regards to basic pharmacology, while medical students were stronger than pharmacy students in writing prescriptions, highlights the potential role for interprofessional learning in clinical pharmacology and therapeutics. Interprofessional learning allows students to learn from each other, and to recognize each other's skills in future multidisciplinary clinical practice 2.

We found that interprofessional problem based learning with medical and pharmacy students at the University of Sydney, Australia, may change students' attitudes towards those from other disciplines, and that the medical students valued the pharmacy students' input and knowledge 3.

We now deliver case based interprofessional teaching to small groups of medical and pharmacy students on polypharmacy in old age. Aged care is an excellent model for this kind of teaching, due to the emphasis on and evidence for multidisciplinary care 4, as well as the highly prevalent complexities of multiple medication use in this population 5. The 1 h tutorial is led by a geriatrician/clinical pharmacologist (SNH) and a clinical pharmacist/pharmacologist (PRC) and involves group discussion of how to optimize medicines for a patient presented by a medical student. Evaluation of this interprofessional teaching activity has been completed by 54 medical students. When asked, ‘In your opinion, how important is the multidisciplinary team in medication management’, no-one responded not important or minimally important, three students (6%) responded important, 15 (28%) moderately important and the remaining 36 (67%) significantly important. Free text answers on the role of the pharmacist in medication management for older people included a wide range of themes around dispensing, patient education, compliance, medicines information and medicines review. Students also provided comprehensive written descriptions of the roles of nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, social workers and dieticians in medication management. This suggests that the students had obtained good knowledge and understanding of interprofessional practice.

We believe that there is good and growing evidence that interprofessional learning has a key role in clinical pharmacology and therapeutics teaching. In addition, having an understanding and appreciation of the role and contribution of other health care providers allows practitioners to work together professionally as part of the health care team to ensure better patient outcomes.

Competing Interests

All authors have completed the Unified Competing Interest form at http://www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available on request from the corresponding author) and declare no support from any organization for the submitted work, no financial relationships with any organizations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous 3 years and no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.