Assessing the pharmacy students' knowledge of common medical terms after a curricular change in Saudi Arabia

Medical terminology is the vocabulary used to describe the human body and its conditions; fluency in this language is essential for health care professionals. We examined the level of basic medical terminology understanding among 347 pharmacy students in four different colleges of pharmacy in Saudi Arabia using a newly developed test of 30 multiple choice questions. Students in the relatively new colleges of pharmacy were more likely to have a higher score in the medical terminology test compared to their counterparts from the old college of pharmacy (β = 1.23, 95% CI = 0.16-2.30, P-value = 0.02). Female gender (β = 1.72, 95% CI = 0.57-2.88, P-value = 0.003), and advanced class level (β = 0.84, 95% CI = 0.36-1.32, P-value < 0.001) were also positively associated with high medical terminology test scores. The findings of this study reveal a deficiency in the pharmacy students' level of understanding of basic medical terms which may necessitate a reintroduction of the medical terminology course into the pharmacy curriculum.