Teaching clinical pharmacology and therapeutics: selective for fourth-year medical students

Teaching clinical pharmacology remains both a lifelong learning process and a lifelong challenge for clinical pharmacologists and other medical educators. In the current information age, with an explosion of drug-related data, the prime topic for discussion is how to teach clinical pharmacology. This article describes our response to the challenges in developing a selective course in clinical pharmacology, and our experience from the first 2 years of the course. Our emphasis is on how to provide in an efficient way knowledge, skills, and attitudes students will need as physicians in the coming decades. Faculty from the Center for Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Pittsburgh in conjunction with faculty from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have developed a one-month intensive course in clinical pharmacology. The integrated course program consists of four overlapping components: 1) general clinical pharmacology (focused on individualization of drug therapy); 2) rational prescribing principles (general principles of drug selection, how to prepare a personal formulary); 3) disease-specific clinical topics (pharmacotherapy of diseases and medical conditions most commonly seen in routine medical practice); and 4) workshops for special attention topics (pharmacokinetics, pain treatment, toxicology, dialysis). In congruence with established educational goals, the course includes drug-, patient-, and disease-oriented concepts. A variety of learning formats (didactic and interactive lectures, one-day problem-based learning sessions, small group case discussions, self-directed and small group directed learning, quizzes, and computer-assisted learning) are used to teach students how to apply the general concepts of clinical pharmacology and rational pharmacotherapy to clinical medicine, and to prepare them to become independent lifelong learners in therapeutics. Student feedback from the first 2 years of this course indicates that this multi-modal teaching format is effective. The majority of students who took the course in clinical pharmacology in 1997 found it to be very beneficial.