Victorian College of Pharmacy News

Pharmacy students treat virtual patients

September 2004

Students in Dr Jennifer Marriott’s Clinical Pharmacy unit are using an innovative new computer program which allows them to work with and treat their own ‘virtual patients’.

The case-based assessment method, developed by Dr Marriott, is being used by approximately 200 third year students and 175 fourth year students enrolled in the Bachelor of Pharmacy. Dr Marriott developed the assessment method as part of her studies for the Graduate Certificate of Higher Education.

The assignment has been devised to present situations in a realistic a way to enable students to be assessed on their ability to deal with ‘real-life’ problem-solving situations.

“In effect, the students are treating a virtual patient and need to deal with their scenario as they would if they were a practising pharmacist,” Dr Marriott said.

Each student chooses their own patient from a database of 200 ‘virtual’ patients which has information including the patient’s age, gender, smoking and allergy history, up to four medical diagnoses and up to six medications plus test results where appropriate from a database which has more than 150 medical diagnoses and more than 300 drugs – each with individualized dosage regimens.

“Once the student has chosen their patient, that patient is not available to any other student and forms the basis of a unique assignment that they will complete over the final two year’s of the course,” she said.

Using the program, Dr Marriott is able to randomly assign pre-prepared clinical ‘scenarios’ to the patients within assigned limits.

In third year the patients are assigned a respiratory scenario, such as hay fever or a cold, and in fourth year they are assigned a dermatological scenario, ranging from nappy rash to a pressure sore.

“To complete the assignment the student has to diagnose and determine appropriate management of the symptoms presented in the scenario.”

Since its introduction to the Victorian College of Pharmacy in July, Dr Marriott said it has been extremely well received by the students.

“The students found the program easy to access and in fact 149 of the students had logged on and chosen their patient on the first day the program was available,” Dr Marriott said.

“This program would be suitable for use by other disciplines as well, she said.

“Once you have the bank of standard patients then it would be simple to develop scenarios suitable for students in Medicine, Nursing, Physiotherapy, etc. It is a flexible, easy to manage program that would certainly be attractive to other Pharmacy schools”.

The program was written by Michael Calagaz and Eric Goh from the Media Development Unit, Centre for Learning and Teaching Support, Gippsland in line with specifications set out by Dr Marriott.