Description and Assessment of an Early Curriculum to Teach Pharmacy Students Caring Behaviours
Keywords:
Behaviour, Caring, Curriculum, Educational assess- ment, PharmacyAbstract
This work describes the effectiveness of a curriculum on first semester, first professional year pharmacy students’ ability to identify and demonstrate professionally specific caring behaviours. A one group, pre-post, quasi-experimental design was used to evaluate the application skills of students when provided patient case situations through use of a Professional Caring Behaviour Survey (PCBS). The PCBS was administered at baseline and at course end. An improvement in mean score from 24.65 to 27.54 was observed at (t=7:768; p < 0:001). The instrument was also administered to second, third and fourth year pharmacy students who had not received this learning design. The mean scores achieved for each academic cohort year (1st = 24.68; 2nd = 24.96; 3rd = 24.26; 4th = 24.31) were not significantly different (one-way ANOVA: p = 0.551; reliability = 0.71): This work suggests that explicit teaching of caring behaviours is necessary if we expect students to recognise and consider these behaviours as preferred when progressing through their professional education program.References
Allmark, P. (1998) “Is caring a virtue?”, Journal of Advanced Nursing 28(3), 466–472.
Branch, W.T. (2000) “The ethics of caring in medical education”, Academic Medicine 75(2), 127–132.
Campbell, D.T. and Stanley, J.C. (1963) Experimental and Quasi- Experimental Designs for Research (Rand McNally College Publishing Company, Chicago).
Cohen, J. (1988) Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioural Sciences, 2nd ed. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Hillsdale, NJ).
Commission to Implement Change in Pharmaceutical Education (1993a) “Background paper I: what is the mission of pharmaceutical education?”, American Journal of Pharmacy Education 57, 343–376.
Commission to Implement Change in Pharmaceutical Education (1993b) “Background paper II: entry level, curricular outcomes, curricular content and educational process”, American Journal of Pharmacy Education 57, 377–384.
Duffy, J.R. (1992) “The impact of nurse caring on patient outcomes”, Chapter 8, In: Gaut, D.A., ed, The Presence of Caring in Nursing (National League for Nursing Press, NewYork, NY).
Ebel, R.L. (1972) Essentials of Educational Measurement (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ), p 414.
Galt, K.A. (2000) “The need to define “care” in pharmaceutical
care: an examination across research, practice and education”,
American Journal of Pharmacy Education 64, 223–233.
Gaut, D.A. (1986) “Evaluating caring competencies in nursing
practice”, Topics of Clinical Nursing 8(3), 77–83.
Gordon, D. (1978) “Curing medicine and caring medicine: a
dilemma in medical education”, Australian Family Physician 7(7),
– 784.
Gramling, L. and Nugent, K. (1998) “Teaching caring within the
context of health”, Nurse Educator 23(2), 47–51.
Hepler, C.D. (1996) “Philosophical issues raised by pharmaceutical care”, In: Haddad, A.M. and Buerki, R.A., eds, Ethical Dimensions of Pharmaceutical Care (Hawthorne Press, Bingham-
ton, NY).
Kane, R.L. (1997) Understanding Health and Outcomes Research
(Aspen Publishers, Gaithersburg, MD).
Knight, J.A. (1995) “Moral growth in medical students”, Medicine
(3), 265–280.
Krathwohl, D.R., Bloom, B.S. and Masia, B.B. (1964) Taxonomy of
Educational Objectives; The Classification of Educational Goals,
Handbook II—Affective Domain (Longman, White Plains, NY).
Layman, E. (1996) “Ethics education: curricular considerations for the allied health disciplines”, Journal of Allied Health 25(2),
– 160.
LeCompte, M.D. and Schensul, J.J. (1999a) Designing and
Conducting Ethnographic Research (Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA) Vol. 1.
LeCompte, M.D. and Schensul, J.J. (1999b) Analyzing and Interpreting Ethnographic Data (Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA) Vol. 5.
Leininger, M. (1978) Transcultural Nursing: Concepts, Theories and Practices (Wiley, New York).
Leininger, M. (1981) Caring: An Essential Human Need. Proceedings of the Three National Caring Conferences (Charles B. Slack, Thorofare, NJ).
Mahowald, M.D. (1996) “Care and its pitfalls”, In: Haddad, A.M. and Buerki, R.A., eds, Ethical Dimensions of Pharmaceutical Care (Hawthorne Press, Binghamton, NY).
Morse, J.M. and Field, P.A. (1995) Qualitative Research Methods for Health Professionals (Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA).
Nash, D.B., Manfredi, M.P., Bozarth, B. and Howell, S. (2000)
Connecting with the New Healthcare Consumer—Defining your
Strategy (McGraw-Hill Healthcare Education Group, USA).
Papers of the Commission to Implement Change in Pharmaceutical Education(1993), American Journal of Pharmacy Education 56,
– 398.
Puchalski, C.M. and Larson, D.B. (1998) “Developing curricula in
spirituality and medicine”, Academic Medicine 73(9), 970–974.
Reich, W.T. (1996) In: Buerki, R.A., ed, What Care can Mean for
Pharmaceutical Ethics (Hawthorne Press, Binghamton, NY).
Stern, D.T. (1998) “Practicing what we preach? An analysis of the curriculum of values in medical education”, American Journal of
Medicine 104(6), 569–575.
Wallace, A.G. (1997) “Educating tomorrow’s doctors: the thing that
really matters is that we care”, Academic Medicine 72(4), 253 – 258.
Watson, J. (1979) Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring (Little Brown, Boston, MA).
