John Keating, Laura Sahm, William Joynes, Sima Purohit
Background
It can be a daunting task for an undergraduate student to comprehend the structure of their curriculum and how it relates to the profession they wish to practise post-graduation. It is akin to arriving in a new city but without a map, or trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without access to the puzzle image. Without signposting to students the reasons underpinning the design of their curriculum, their engagement can falter and learning suffer.
The Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland (PSI) Core Competency Framework (CCF) is the cornerstone of the PSI’s programme to reform/inform training and education of undergraduate and practising Irish pharmacists. The design, content and pedagogical approaches within the University College Cork (UCC) MPharm programme have been heavily influenced and mapped to the CCF framework. Testimonies from UCC MPharm students and faculty have uncovered challenges recognising where pharmacy themes such as patient safety and diabetes are located and taught across the curriculum and how they link to CCF behaviours. Such challenges have been documented with pharmacy students in other jurisdictions.
To help fill this knowledge gap, visually appealing, informative and systematically designed posters were developed which map UCC MPharm curriculum themes in a hierarchical manner to academic years, modules, modular activities and, ultimately, the CCF. These posters were evaluated for their usefulness and ease of navigation by the key end-user stakeholders – pharmacy faculty and undergraduate pharmacy students.
Methodology
Data on curriculum components relevant to three MPharm themes – patient safety, antimicrobials and diabetes – were collected by interviewing module coordinators and analysing Blackboard® Virtual Learning Environment modular content and Book of Modules entries. Following data collection, landscape-orientated A0 posters (one poster per theme), were designed to illustrate how each theme maps to the CCF via associated activities performed within modules. Posters were critiqued on their design, content and usefulness through five focus groups composed of MPharm student year groups and pharmacy faculty. Thematic analysis of focus group data was subsequently performed.
Results
Pharmacy students and faculty found the theme-mapped posters intuitively straightforward to navigate, user-friendly and enhanced their understanding of the relevance and application of the PSI CCF in informing the design of their MPharm curriculum. Analysis of focus group data has further indicated that the chosen spider diagram-like mapping design is readily adaptable to map not only a competency framework to a curriculum but also other curricular features such as pedagogical approaches and experiential placements.
