Learning from Medication Errors: Leveraging a Journal Scan Assignment to Teach Medication Safety

Background: Medication Safety is an integral part of health sciences education that is not always provided enough dedicated time during the standard didactic curriculum. At our institution, medication safety is an elective course offered to second-year College of Pharmacy students (P2s). This elective is meant to supplement the ‘Just Culture’ concept in healthcare that is embraced by our university medical center. This elective is taught through a combination of hands-on assignments and guest lecturers sharing their real-world experiences along with the direct impacts of medication errors. This session will discuss how a journal scan assignment was structured to help reinforce the importance of medication safety.

Description: This medication safety elective presents a novel pedagogic approach for P2 students to become more aware of the consequences of medication errors prior to their objective structured clinical examinations (OSCE) as a P3 and Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experiences (APPE) as a P4 before graduation. The course coordinator invited the pharmacy liaison librarian to become integrated throughout the course and act as co-coordinator and to directly engage the students through the course’s journal scan assignment. The liaison librarian performs a search of the literature in PubMed to identify recent articles discussing medication errors. Students are then partnered in groups of two to review an article and create a 10-minute journal scan presentation reviewing their assigned article. In addition to this journal scan assignment, students complete an interview assignment with an experienced pharmacist or pharmacy technician. Feedback from the course is collected via a standard course evaluation which is provided at the end of the semester. In addition to the course evaluation, current and previous students are surveyed to evaluate their opinions on medication safety and the impact of the assignment during their OSCE, APPE, internship, and in the workplace.

Conclusion: This elective course presents a unique opportunity for the liaison librarian to become more involved in the pharmacy curriculum and directly engage with students. It also exposes students to a unique learning experience that allows them to use their literature evaluation skills acquired in the curriculum while delivering a presentation meant to engage the audience. We are expecting to: 1) measure whether the journal scan and literature evaluation presentation are viewed as an effective way to learn about medication safety, and 2) determine whether this elective course impacts student opinions and practice on medication errors. Future steps include the potential to create a similar but interprofessional course with nursing, physician assistant, and medical students at our institution to strengthen collaboration between health sciences students.