Abstract:

Due to the complexity of pharmaceutical tasks, pharmacy students need implementation of the new technology in their education in order to make training on those tasks easier and efficient. One of the ideas that may help in improving efficiency of pharmaceutical tasks training is the peer evaluation and collaborative education. Due to the potential of social networking and web 2.0 in the collaboration and interactivity of students and information sharing, Facebook was chosen to help in encouraging interaction between students during practicing prescription dispensing and promoting competition between them in fast delivery of drugs to the patient after critical assessment and consequently better patient service. The methodology includes asking students to sing up for an account in Facebook and adding each other as friends. Students were then asked to post the time of receiving the prescription from the patient and write the full information of the prescription. When student finishes preparing the prescription he was asked to post the time at which he delivered the medications to the patient. Other students were asked to watch the time duration required for preparing the prescription and prescription information and comment on each other. They were informed that they will be marked according to the number and quality (in terms of absence of errors) of prescription they are going to finish per day.
Then they were asked to present the number of prescriptions, time needed to prepare it and their colleagues comments in a final table along with personal record about their educational progress (personal portfolio).
They were marked against predefined and agreed upon rubrics.
The results showed that using Facebook during clinical training for pharmacy students increased the rate and decreased the time duration needed for prescription dispensing. It increased their attention toward reading prescription and finding prescription errors. They find that using Facebook in clinical training on prescription dispensing increased their confidence in prescription preparation (83.3%). Fifty eight percent of them felt that using Facebook increased patient satisfaction. This was more elaborated by students' interviews and inference from the project outputs in terms of three different formats; reports, prescription information tables and personal portfolios. Peer evaluation was then conducted by students
Conclusion: Proper design and implementation of Facebook in pharmacy students' clinical training may help in engagement and collaboration among students and render pharmaceutical tasks' training less complex.

Keywords:

Facebook, web 2.0, pharmacy students' training, prescription dispensing.