Abstract:

The teaching group work “transversal clinical cases” group of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences (CCT-FARMA; Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain) introduced a teaching innovation project based on the use of clinical cases as a tool to implement transversal education, from the first to the fifth year of the Pharmacy degree, and to avoid excessive compartmentalization of the acquired knowledge. In addition to promote integrated knowledge acquisition, this project aimed to improve student awareness about the impact on public health of clinical cases with high prevalence among populations and of epidemiological interest. The first implemented case was alcohol consumption due to its high prevalence among undergraduate students. The results of this experience, although interesting from the point of view of the methodology and the social impact among students, were not conclusive enough to fully evaluate evidences of teaching innovations.

In the present study, the CCT-FARMA group introduced a clinical case dealing with the health effects of tobacco smoking. The applied methodology includes changes in teaching strategy, learning activities and modes of evaluation. To assess the overall efficiency of the new project it is essential to obtain control data from students that did not received specific training on the clinical case. To this end, analysis of background knowledge of the effect of tobacco smoking on health in undergraduate students of Pharmacy degree, previous to the introduction of the clinical case, was performed by means of a presential, voluntary and anonymous test applied to first- (n = 203) and fifth-year (n = 166) undergraduate students. The test includes: i) objective issues about acquired knowledge along the curriculum studies; and ii) subjective issues about the student perception concerning acquisition of this knowledge.

As expected, our findings show that the fifth-year students exhibited a more specific understanding of smoking effects on health. Thus, compared to first-year students they succesfully addressed technical questions specifically acquired during the degree. Furthermore, 91 % of fifth-year students (versus 15 % of first-year students) considered that the curricular itinerary of the degree has offered them sufficient knowledge to understand the health effects of tobacco smoking (p<0.001). By contrast, the familiar and social environment showed greater influence on first-year students in regards of the relationships between health and smoking (89 % versus 73 %; p<0.001). In addition, fifth-year students deemed that the acquired knowledge during the Pharmacy degree will prevent them from tobacco use (70 % versus 52 %; p<0.05) and feel more competent as future pharmacists (99 % versus 91 %; p<0.01).

The results obtained will be used as a control to assess knowledge acquisition and integration capacity to implement the tranversal clinical case about health consequences of tobacco smoking in the degree of Pharmacy.

Keywords:

Clinical case, tobacco smoking, integrative learning, undergraduate students of Pharmacy degree.