Using Case Study as a Teaching Method for Pharmacy Students to Analyse Psychosocial and Ergonomic Factors

Every day, pharmacists are facing a great variety of health risks in pharmacies and laboratories related to the production of medicines. These risks include chemical-biological factors, inadequate ergonomics, and psychosocial factors. Laboratories are not only used for various tests to assess the effectiveness and safety of new medicinal substances. It also deals with the medicines meeting quality standards. Furthermore, medicine laboratories carry out analytical tests to determine the composition and properties of substances. As extemporaneous manufacturing is still widely used by pharmacies in many European countries, in Lithuania, dermatological medicinal products are among the most popular extemporaneously produced. Case study as a teaching method, which examines individual situations that require more detailed investigation (Fidel 1984, Henneman & Axtel 2024), has been used in the training of pharmacy students for many years: to examine ethical issues (Weinstein 1997), to investigate the ability of pharmacists to use digital databases of medicines and hospital databases (Macklure and Stewart 2017), and to investigate a range of psychosocial factors (Rens et.al 2023). This research aims to use a case study teaching method in pharmacy students’ lectures to explore the key risk factors in extemporaneous medical product manufacturing. The objectives are as follows: 1. To analyse the main risk factors and their impact on health: ergonomic, chemical, biological, and psychosocial. 2. to investigate the most common challenges faced by pharmacists, both in the pharmacy and the drug laboratory. 3. to evaluate the effectiveness of the case study method in helping pharmacy students identify key biological, ergonomic, and psychosocial factors that may be contributing to health problems.