Using drug information to bridge basic science with pharmacy practice

Background: Drug Information (DI) skills are essential to pharmacists and encompass information retrieval along with literature evaluation on drug characteristics, including foundational sciences. A novel approach was implemented using DI focused learning opportunities to educate first year learners about clinical relevance and integration of basic science concepts into pharmacist knowledge. Methods: A lecture introduced the integration by mapping sections of a drug’s prescribing information to all courses in the University of Kansas School of Pharmacy curriculum. An innovative activity required students to use the knowledge obtained from concurrent P1 courses to determine the cause of death of a fictional patient. Other activities included answering drug availability questions on the clinical development process and presenting a research article. Assessment of learning was based on student performance. Results: From 2019 to 2021, the proportion of students who determined the cause of death ranged from 59-67%, and the mean scores for the drug development assignments were 94-95%.  The median score was 8/10 for the rubric item discussing the relevance of the research article to basic science and/or pharmacy practice, and total scores for the presentation ranged from 80-98%. Conclusion: Based on the results, students demonstrated their understanding of the relationship between basic science and pharmacy practice.