Student selected components as an educational platform for teaching medical students about clinical pharmacology and quality improvement activities

Student selected components (SSCs) are increasingly described elements of medical undergraduate education, training and curricula. SSCs offer the potential for integration into both traditional (‘pre-clinical’ versus ‘clinical’) medical curricula, as well as into other innovative or evolving medical training curricula. This article employs a structured and descriptive approach to exemplify the process by which year 1 medical students were supported in a practical manner to undertake a distinct small group SSC project. In this illustration, the SSC was focused on a quality improvement (QI) topic of relevance to clinical pharmacology and therapeutics (CPT), and involved a review of the anticholinergic burden of inpatient prescriptions for a defined cohort. The SSC was completed in the context of a teaching hospital’s medicine of the elderly (MoE) clinical service. In a sequential manner, the paper describes experiential learning points from the perspective of a supervisor of an SSC project. The paper offers educational value with a potential for generalisable application to non-clinical and clinical educationalists. Furthermore, the paper offers guidance to supervisors, teachers, tutors and facilitators, with encouragement to consider how they may design similar projects for the training of undergraduate medical students in centres that they are affiliated with. The paper also highlights another key driver for productive SSCs i.e. the central principle of striving to promote projects and activities that support active student engagement, rather than merely passive inclusion.