INTERPROFESSIONAL CLINICAL EDUCATION OF MEDICAL AND PHARMACY STUDENTS

Pharmacists have become increasingly involved in influencing prescribi ng. Pharmaceutical education has changed accordingly, with increased t eaching in therapeutics, partly on hospitals wards, giving students an insight into diseases and helping communication with clinicians. To e xtend this idea we have designed joint therapeutics teaching sessions with pharmacy and medical students. The scheme involves final year pha rmacy students who have completed a course in clinical pharmacy and me dical students who have completed their second MB. Interdisciplinary p airs of students are assigned a patient with common medical and therap eutic problems, such as arthritis, diabetes and cardiac failure; patie nts on multiple drug treatments are preferred. They jointly obtain a h istory: the medical student performs basic clerking, while the pharmac y student obtains the medication history. The medical student subseque ntly presents a brief medical history, with a summary of the patient's current problems. For each problem, the pharmacy student presents the current therapy, its rationale and how it is to be monitored. Experie nce with 73 students over 3 years has shown that almost all found sess ions with students from another. discipline useful. Few felt that memb ers of the pairs contributed unequally. The main problem appeared to b e insufficient time (although 21/2h were allowed). Most students favou red more such sessions. Little difference in ability appeared between the two disciplines; there was considerable co-operation and little na scent 'professional rivalry'. The medical students were more comfortab le interviewing patients, and the pharmacy students more confident ana lysing drug therapy. It is concluded that such interdisciplinary sessi ons are a successful method of clinical teaching and should be encoura ged.