Description and Assessment of an Early Curriculum to Teach Pharmacy Students Caring Behaviours

This work describes the effectiveness of a curriculum on first semester, first professional year pharmacy students’ ability to identify and demonstrate professionally specific caring behaviours. A one group, pre-post, quasi-experimental design was used to evaluate the application skills of students when provided patient case situations through use of a Professional Caring Behaviour Survey (PCBS). The PCBS was administered at baseline and at course end. An improvement in mean score from 24.65 to 27.54 was observed at (t=7:768; p < 0:001). The instrument was also administered to second, third and fourth year pharmacy students who had not received this learning design. The mean scores achieved for each academic cohort year (1st = 24.68; 2nd = 24.96; 3rd = 24.26; 4th = 24.31) were not significantly different (one-way ANOVA: p = 0.551; reliability = 0.71): This work suggests that explicit teaching of caring behaviours is necessary if we expect students to recognise and consider these behaviours as preferred when progressing through their professional education program.