Using patient videos in pharmacology education within medicine and pharmacy curricula

Safe and effective pharmacotherapy not only requires biomedical and pharmacological knowledge, but also insight into the patient's perspective. Although factors such as personal beliefs, acceptance of side effects or medicine costs influence pharmacotherapy, these non-clinical factors are not extensively discussed within the health professions education (HPE) curricula. Incorporating patient-perspective into pharmacology could therefore help minimize drug-related problems in patients. As videos provide a holistic depiction of the patient's life, using patient videos, instead of commonly used, paper-based case studies, could be suitable to reach this objective. Here we aim to study effectiveness of patient videos as a tool for teaching HPE students on the value of patient's perspective in pharmacology and pharmacotherapy. An interactive lecture on pharmacokinetics was developed for first-year bachelor medical and pharmacy undergraduate students. The educational intervention included watching a patient video, followed by focused exercises and plenary discussions on various pharmacological and patient-perspective related topics. The lecture concluded with students filling up a questionnaire with both open-ended questions and Likert-scale based statements. Besides learning about pharmacological principles (e.g. clinical relevance of pharmacokinetics), students additionally learnt about other prescribing-related topics (e.g. therapy failure, shared decision making) and were able to identify skills required of healthcare professionals, beyond those connected directly to pharmacotherapy (e.g. empathy, listening). The study identifies patient videos as a highly suitable educational tool. Not only do videos teach about the various pharmacological principles, but they also add an extra dimension to pharmacology teaching and learning and can easily be integrated into existing teaching modalities.