Abstract:

The development of transversal clinical cases through curricular studies offers an opportunity to improve integrative learning skills of undergraduate students. To stimulate knowledge acquisition and integrative abilities in Pharmacy degree students, in recent years the teaching group work CCT-FARMA of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences of the Universitat de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain) introduced two transversal clinical cases with high prevalence and epidemiological impact on the society and, in particular, on the university students: alcohol consumption and tobacco smoking. To this end, the students were taught the biochemical, molecular, pathophysiological and toxicological effects of alcohol consumption and tobacco smoking on human health as separate clinical cases that were implemented as part of core compulsory subjects of the 5-year curricular studies of the Pharmacy degree. Depending on each subject and clinical case, teaching activities included resolution of on-site and on-line true/false and integrative questionnaires, student team working and seminars. The subject of Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Pathology is taught in the 4th year (8th semester) of the curricular studies of the Pharmacy degree. Therefore, the students of this subject already received most of the transversal formation of the clinical cases. Given that alcohol consumption and tobacco smoking have major clinical consequences, both clinical cases were introduced in each of the 10 lessons included in the Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Pathology programme. With the aim to assess whether transversal clinical cases can improve knowledge acquisition and integrative skills in the Pharmacy degree, Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Pathology students that were trained on the two clinical cases in previous courses resolved an on-site test consisting of true/false questions as part of the evaluation process of the Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Pathology subject (n = 144). The test included 10 questions mentioning clinical aspects about diabetes mellitus, hyperlipidaemia, clinical biomarkers and pregnancy complications. From 10 questions, 5 explicitly addressed clinical consequences of alcohol consumption or tobacco smoking, while 5 questions were not related with the clinical cases. Although no significant, a trend to obtain a 5 % higher score was observed in questions related with the clinical cases (p = 0.334). Detailed analysis of the results showed that the percentage of correct answers was not significantly different between questions related with the clinical cases and non-related questions. However, the percentage of incorrect answers significantly decreased more than 2-fold when the students resolved questions related with the clinical cases (4.6 % versus 10.0 % for non-related questions with the clinical cases; p < 0.001). Our findings support the notion that implementation of transversal clinical cases through curricular studies may improve integrative learning and knowledge acquisition in Pharmacy degree students.

Keywords:

Clinical case, alcohol consumption, tobacco smoking, teaching innovation, integrative learning, Pharmacy degree.