EVALUATION OF THE STUDENTS' KNOWLEDGE ABOUT SPECIFIC SKILLS IN PHARMACOKINETICS

INTRODUCTION Biopharmacy and Pharmacokinetics (BP) is a subject provided in third year of the Pharmacy studies, according to the syllabus of the University of Valencia. This module is organized in lectures where students learn basic concepts and later apply them in hands-on labs, seminars and tutorials. However, due to the current trend towards multidisciplinary subjects, students can meet concepts of BP before this course. METHODS The objective of this study is to assess the prior knowledge of concepts of pharmacokinetics that have students, as compared with those obtained after completing this course. Students of pharmacy (3 degrees, 4 degrees or 5 degrees level) in University of Valencia and Miguel Hernandez University were selected to this study and the subject was based on pharmacokinetic and biopharmacy. The number of students was 256. These students were classified based on students who passed the exam of the subject (70 student), students who have not attended the subject yet (18 student) or those who have attended but not did not pass the subject (168 students). An easy questionnaire was prepared with one question about their personal syllabus and 54 questions classified into four categories: - B: Basic concepts (students must know) - G: General concepts (students should know) - S: Specific concepts commons to other subjects - BP: Specific concepts of BP The answers were included in three categories: 1) I've never heard about it 2) I heard about it 3) I know its meaning The answers were completely anonymous and data analysis was made by SPSS Statistics 19. RESULTS Results in students who have not attended BP were found similar for basic concepts (as differential equation, function or dependent variable) and specific concepts (as bioavailability, area under the curve or volume of distribution): percentages of students who have never heard about these concepts were 30 and 40% respectively. However, these percentages are so much lower in students that have passed the subject: percentages around 5%. About 50% of students who haven not attended BP know the meaning of basic, general and specifics concepts, but only 23% have knowledge about specific concepts in BP. All these percentages increase above 70% when students attend to BP. CONCLUSION Students would need to enhance their knowledge about basic concepts before attending to specific subjects in order to improve their performance. Nevertheless, good results have been found in basic and specific skills after passing the course.