Methods: We sent e-mail invitations to a web-based survey to year one and two students at College of Medicine, King Saud University. Items included the process, content, and benefits of PBL feedback.
Results: Of 209 respondents, 110 (53%) were first and 99 (47%) were second-year students. About 50% agreed that the feedback was regularly provided at scheduled timing and 72% perceived feedback environment as non-threatening. Agreement rates that the tutors asked students first to assess their performance, tell them what went well, what the areas for improvement are and develop with them an improvement plan were 59%, 61%, 61% and 52%, respectively. 61% agreed that tutors judged performance not personality. More year one students significantly agreed that the PBL feedback helped them to improve their knowledge acquisition and non-technical skills.
Conclusion: Many of our PBL tutors have started the shift to a dialogic bi-directional feedback. We recommend continuing the faculty development efforts, peer-reviewing, and seeking student's feedback within the academic quality satisfaction surveys.
Objective: To assess the impact of pharmacist-supervised intervention on HRQoL of newly diagnosed diabetics using an Audit of Diabetes-Dependent Quality of Life (ADDQoL) questionnaire.
Materials and Methods: A pre-post comparison study was conducted among the control group (CG), test 1 group (T1G) and test 2 group (T2G) patients with three treatment arms to explore the impact of pharmacist-supervised intervention on HRQoL of newly diagnosed diabetics for 18 months. Patients' HRQoL scores were determined using ADDQoL questionnaire at baseline, 3, 6, 9 and 12-months. T1G patients received pharmacist's intervention whereas T2G patients received diabetic kit demonstration in addition to pharmacist's intervention. CG patients were deprived of pharmacist intervention and diabetic kit demonstration, and only received care from attending physician/nurses. Non-parametric tests were used to find the differences in an average weighted impact scores (AWIS) among the groups before and after the intervention at P ≤ 0.05.
Results: Friedman test identified significant (P < 0.001) improvement in AWIS among the test groups' patients. Differences in scores were significant between T1G and T2G at 6-months (P = 0.033), 9-months (P < 0.001) and 12-months (P < 0.001); between CG and T1G at 12-months (P < 0.001) and between CG and T2G at 9-months (P < 0.001) and 12-months (P < 0.0010) on Mann.Whitney U test.
Conclusion: Pharmacist's intervention improved AWIS of test groups' diabetics. Diabetic kit demonstration strengthened the disease understanding and selfcare skills of T2G patients. Disease and self-care awareness among diabetics should be increased in Nepali healthcare system by involving pharmacists for better patient's related outcomes.
Materials and Methods: A total of 324 undergraduate preclinical (year 2) and clinical (year 3-5) medical students participated in this study. The research design used thematic analysis of an open-ended questionnaire to analyze the qualitative data.
Results: The thematic analysis detected five major emergent themes: lack of remembering (18.2%), lack of understanding (28.4%), difficulty in applying (3.6%), difficulty in analysis (15.1%), and difficulty in interpretation (17.8%), of which addressing these challenges could be taken as a foundation step upon which medical educators put an emphasis on in order to improve ECG teaching and learning.
Conclusion: Negative attitude toward ECG learning poses a serious threat to acquire competency in ECG interpretation skill. The concept of student's memorizing ECG is not a correct approach; instead, understanding the concept and vector analysis is an elementary key for mastering ECG interpretation skill. The finding of this study sheds light into a better understanding of medical students' deficient points of ECG learning in parallel with taxonomy of cognitive domain and enables the medical teachers to come up with effective and innovative strategies for innovative ECG learning in an undergraduate medical curriculum.
Method: The nature of patient-pharmacist counseling interactions was explored with seven patients (one focus group), and 10 practicing pharmacists (two focus groups, three semi-structured interviews). The themes identified informed the development of an online survey that was advertised online to patients and pharmacists across Australia.
Results: A total of 95 patients and 208 pharmacists completed the survey. Overall, more than half of patients (77/95) were satisfied with the care provided by their pharmacist, but only a third (71/205) of pharmacists were satisfied with the care they provided to patients. The majority of patients (67/94) reported that pharmacists provided good information about medications. This aligned with pharmacists' responses, as most reported focusing on medication side effects (118/188) and instructions for taking pain medication (93/183) during patient interactions. However, when asked about empathy and rapport from pharmacists, only half to two-thirds (48-61/95) of patients expressed positive views. Overall, half of the patients (39/75) wanted a caring, empathetic, respectful, and private conversation with the pharmacist, and nearly half (40/89) perceived the pharmacist's role as providing (new) information on alternative pharmacological and non-pharmacological therapies, including general advice on pain management.
Conclusion: There was a disparity in the nature of the interaction and information that patients wanted from pharmacists, compared to what was provided by pharmacists. Training and education may help pharmacists to better engage in patient-centered care when interacting with people living with persistent pain, thereby improving health outcomes for these patients.