Blended learning: Improving the diabetes mellitus counseling skills of German pharmacy students

Introduction: Pharmacists have the responsibility to conduct medication therapy management and appropriately counsel patients and physicians on medicines. Blended learning and objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) may have the potential to address these skills. This study aimed to assess whether a blended learning program consisting of e-learning and OSCEs could enhance pharmacy students' abilities to conduct pharmaceutical consultations with type 2 diabetes mellitus patients. Methods: The blended learning program consisted of e-learning, formative OSCEs, and summative OSCEs. The e-learning aimed to bring the students to the same level of diabetes knowledge. The students' baseline consultation skills were measured by a summative pre-training OSCE. After the formative OSCEs, a summative post-training OSCE quantified the change in performance. During the pre- and post-training OSCEs, analytical checklists were used to assess consultation skills and a global rating scale assessed communication skills. Surveys were used to measure students' self-assessment and satisfaction. Results: The study demonstrated significant improvement in students' pharmaceutical knowledge of diabetes mellitus, consultation performances on diabetes mellitus, and self-assessment scores. Most students responded positively on the satisfaction survey. Conclusions: This study demonstrated that a blended learning approach with e-learning and OSCEs can improve students' diabetes consultations and communication skills. These results support the use of this instructional technique for teaching patient counseling. Further studies should consider a control group to assess whether the improvement of the consultation performance is a result of the training or solely a learning effect due to the repetition of summative OSCEs.