Outcomes of pharmaceutical faculty-focused introduction to nursing education for pharmacy students: A questionnaire survey

Abstract

The scope of pharmaceutical education in Japan has been expanding, and with it an awareness of the importance of team medical care. However, pharmaceutical education still gives little attention to the psychosocial aspects of care, instead focusing on the structures and functions of drugs. In contrast, nursing education emphasizes the fact that medical care involves patients’ family and significant others as much as the patients themselves, and thus nursing students are taught the basic needs and developmental stages of those people requiring care alongside their practical nursing skills. In this study, we examined the effect of incorporating certain aspects of introductory nursing education into pharmaceutical education on the self-efficacy of pharmaceutical students. We thus ran an introduction to nursing education course for fourth-year pharmaceutical students (n=86). After the course had finished, we surveyed students about the course. Approximately 94.2% of the students became more interested in team medical care and nearly all (98.8%) thought that what they had learned in the course would be useful in their career. The results indicated that the introduction to nursing education course offered students an opportunity to acquire different viewpoints on clinical situations because the lectures were given by a pharmacist with a nurse license and they were based on his clinical experiences. We therefore propose that more facets of introductory nursing education be incorporated into pharmaceutical education to help students develop their ability to consider patients’ psychosocial backgrounds.