Using focus groups to develop the curriculum for a palliative cancer care online educational programme for community pharmacists.

Summary

This paper reports on the use of focus groups to develop the curriculum for an online palliative cancer care educational programme for Australian community pharmacists. Focus groups using the Nominal Group Technique were carried out with expert stakeholders to: validate, enhance and refine the findings of a literature review and mail survey previously conducted to determine the palliative cancer care educational needs of community pharmacists; and to determine the modules and key messages for the programme. The final programme comprised 11 modules containing three to seven key messages.  The focus groups validated, enhanced and refined earlier findings, and the Nominal Group Technique was found to be a reliable research method for conducting the focus groups.  It is hoped that the findings of this study will increase the confidence of other researchers in using focus groups employing the Nominal Group Technique to aid decision-making related to curriculum design.

Abstract

Aim: To develop a curriculum for a flexible/online palliative cancer care educational programme for Australian community pharmacists using expert stakeholders.

Method: Focus groups with pharmacists (n = 7), doctors (n = 6) and nurses (n = 12) were conducted utilising the Nominal Group Technique. Participants considered a draft of the programme, listing other modules that needed to be included, and three key messages for each module.

Results: The results of each focus group were amalgamated, resulting in a list of 22 modules with multiple key messages. These findings were combined with those from a literature review and pharmacist survey, to arrive at the final programme structure which comprised 11 modules, each containing three to seven key messages.

Conclusion: The focus groups validated, enhanced and refined the findings from the literature review and survey.