Cultural competency in pharmacy education: Bringing the intangible to life through object-based learning

Introduction

Cultural competence is a core professional skill that plays a key role for bridging health inequities among culturally and liniguisticallty diverse populaitons. However, student receptiveness and perceived relevance of content remains a challenge for integrating training in the earlier stages of the curriculum. This study describes the application and preliminary evaluation of object-based learning (OBL) as a pedagogical approach to stimulate student engagement with concepts of cultural competency among first year pharmacy undergraduates.

Methods

A bespoke OBL workshop was implemented in a unit of study with 320 first year undergraduate pharmacy students enrolled. Students worked in small teams of 5to–6 people, handling a curated collection of health-related art, specimens and artefacts across cultures in a 2-h workshop. Across three activities, students critically analysed the collection items.

Results

A total of 169 and 66 students responded to the baseline and post-workshop questionnaire respectively, giving rise to 46 matched pairs who were mostly female (63 %, n = 29) with a mean age of 18.93 (SD =1.36). Nearly half of the respondents self-identified as “Asian” with three quarters speaking a language other than English at home. Post-workshop changes were observed in students' ability to define cultural competence (Z = -2.236, p = 0.025) as well as their perceived levels of cultural competency advancing from “cultural pre-competency” to “cultural competency” (Z = −2.524, p = 0.012). At baseline, students endorsed a high level of agreement with respect to the importance of pharmacists providing culturally appropriate care and the relevance of cultural competence to their future pharmacy career, both of which remained unchanged post-workshop.

Conclusions

OBL is a promising approach to introducing concepts of cultural competency to a first year pharmacy student cohort. There is scope to expand OBL approaches in other areas of skill development in pharmacy education.