Abstract
Pharmacy students in Hong Kong face a common challenge of having limited opportunities to experience professional clinical practice and often till the final year. To better prepare them to communicate with patients, nurses and doctors, innovative pedagogy is needed to be deployed to allow them to have an experiential learning through immersive virtual reality (IVR), which can be used to enable pharmacy students with no clinical experience to have a personal experience with head-mounted headsets through working the interactive cases. Pharmacy students are required to interpret clinical cases and attend pharmacy ward round during year 3 and year 4 of study. There is still lacking systematic teaching material for pharmacy student on preparation of clinical cases, interpretation of clinical notes and clinical abbreviations, as well as assessment of clinical cases. The current proposal is a pioneer project in Hong Kong for the development of clinical pharmacy pedagogy using IVR techniques. We will develop the IVR teaching cases using the real-world patient cases that we have at the Prince of Wales Hospital. We will bring the clinical ward setting with real world practical cases into the classroom. Students will experience first hand clinical exposure in class with guided teaching material step by step to translate clinical knowledge in real practice.
Brief write-up
Project objectives
This project aimed to utilize immersive virtual reality (IVR) technique, and enable pharmacy students to gain experience with the simulated real-world clinical cases by both IVR and non-IVR videos. The ultimate goal of this project was to equip students to develop better clinical skills with patients, nurses, and doctors in the future clinical ward setting.
Activities, process and outcomes
We produced three 360 degree videos to year 3 pharmacy students to experience virtual clinical practice and one non-IVR video to disucss clinical cases in class. The project outcomes facilitated and developed students’ clinical as well as communication and language skills in particular to clinical case presentation and drug information.
Deliverables and evaluation
The project aligned with the university-wide themes particularly in the area of innovation and design. In addition, our work has met the project objectives to promote immersive patient consultation training of professional and the methodology of assessment and evaluation. From pre and post student self-assessment surveys, we detected significant improvement in their learning.
Dissemination, diffusion, impact and sharing of good practices
We plan to disseminate our experience in this project in local and international conferences. In the current project, we found out that IVR technique has its advantages and disadvantages in clinical pharmacy education. The advantages of IVR technique includes the feasibility to bring real-world cases into the classroom and the demonstration of clinical pharmacy skills in the real world. This greatly enhanced the knowledge application and in-class discussion. The disadvantages of IVR technique includes the complexity and time consuming process for the video production and students may not have the proper head-mount devices for the IVR video viewing. In addition, we will work with other CUHK colleagues and seek input from external parties to refine our IVR learning programme.
