A COLLABORATIVE LEARNING BETWEEN HEALTH PROFESSIONS STUDENTS OF VETERINARY AND PHARMACY FROM SPAIN AND PERU

Current demographic shifts and technological advances are causing many educators and health professionals around the world to call for new models for educating health professionals that better reflects the reality and the new “wide” society these students will be serving. We are in an era of “One World, One Health” and we must devise adaptive, forward-looking and multi-disciplinary solutions to the challenges that undoubtedly lie ahead.

Today’s health professions education requires innovative mechanism to cultivate new global thought and a multi-disciplinary collaborative working environment. Educators are now beginning to develop more systematic curricular approaches for developing interprofessional competencies, but also is needed emphasizes cross-disciplinary responsibilities and accountability to achieve improved outcomes.

Health professions education is attracting widespread interest. In our case we are creating new opportunities for health professions students of veterinary and pharmacy from Spain and Peru to engage in interactive learning with those outside their profession as a part of their education. The goal of the interprofessional learning is to prepare all health professions students for deliberatively working together in order to multiply results when they solve common problems. Only by breaking down the barriers among, individuals, specialties and countries can we unleash the innovation and expertise needed to meet the many serious challenges to the health of people, domestic animals, and wildlife and to the integrity of ecosystems.
The aim of our project is identify, throughout an international and interdisciplinary online Problem-Based Learning pilot course that involve common curricular aspects in pharmacology, analysing the main factors that facilitate and inhibit online collaborative learning/working for health profession students using simply open access and both synchronous and asynchronous communication skills (blogs, chat and videoconferences) with a structured and moderated discussion board.

Our preliminary results show that there are many ways pharmacy and veterinary medicine can work in concert. Focused on pharmacology, their education imparts to our students the skills necessary to critically evaluate drug therapy, based on facts from pharmacological drug information. We consider the academic training environment of each profession must include information on the other, in order to prepare professionals for a realistic practice where they will be able to work together, producing an optimal working environment to build a path to better solve pharmacological, therapeutical or public health problems in society.