Cohort July 2022: Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences – Jason Min, Alyssa Azote, Irene Luong, Leslie Guo
Project background
Call for course redesign
Current course schedules in the PharmD program pose barriers in teaching the longitudinal nature of complex topics, such as mental health. Mental health and substance use disorders content require intentional scaffolding with prior topics in the curriculum to better mimic practice – as these disorders are rarely presented in isolation and often require important considerations to other body systems as patients age (i.e. cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, etc.). There is great urgency for educators to respond to our province’s public health emergency on drug overdoses, beginning with meaningful course redesign of mental health topics focusing on the reconceptualization of stigma and application of mental health topics longitudinally across pharmacy education.
Currently, the PharmD program, like many other health programs at UBC, uses paper-based cases to simulate patient care scenarios. Unfortunately, this does not reflect current practices in either community or hospital settings that have adopted more effective and efficient digital and electronic health records (EHR) to care for patients. Paper-based cases are problematic as a teaching tool, as they do not reflect the depth, complexity, and longitudinal narrative of patients in practice that EHRs provide. This is particularly exacerbated in mental health disorders that require careful care coordination, an interprofessional team approach, and consideration of patient symptoms over a long period of time.
Project goals
Our project seeks to address two important areas of course redesign:
- Improve mental health scaffolding in the PharmD program,
- Use an academic version of EHR systems as the teaching medium to simulate longitudinal care.
In doing so, our project will reach students across the first three years of the Pharmacy program and will replace currently used paper-based cases with an academic EHR system version.
Our goals in working with students in this project include:
- Increase student engagement to better create meaningful and relevant cases at appropriate levels of difficulty,
- Increase student opportunities to be part of course redesign and to learn alongside Faculty at the intersection of mental health and digital pedagogies,
- Create learning activities that engage with students’ prior knowledge of de-stigmatizing practices.