2013 台灣藥學會年會暨學術研討會
D-028
First full English course to introduce International Healthcare &
Medication Use toward 1
stto 4
thyear pharmacy students in Taiwan
Arun Kumar, Shan-Chieh Wu (吳善傑), Yi-Liang Chen (陳奕良),
Matthues C. Lu(盧志華), Hsiang-Wen Lin (林香汶)
School of Pharmacy, China Medical University (CMU),
2Department of
Pharmacy, CMU Hospital
To make students understand the subtle meaning of underlying health policies, medication use and health care system in Taiwan and in the other countries, a 2-hour credit, elective, full English course was developed initially in School of Pharmacy and Graduate Institute, China Medical University since 2013 fall semester. The implementation of this course is described here.
This course introduces students with their required communication skills, appropriate attitude and knowledge about healthcare and medication use in Taiwan and the other countries. It intends to facilitate participating students to be able to speak, think, evaluate and appreciate in English. An English teaching material contained relevant YouTube links related to health care, health policy, medication use (i.e., Western medications, Traditional Chinese Medicine) was created by course coordinator. A two section full English PBL classes related to anti-insomnia agents use were performed. International guest lecturers from University of California, San Diego and University of Illinois at Chicago were arranged. The classes were offered using didactic lectures, in-class practices, group discussions, problem-based learning alternatively. The class assignments included the one-minute report to be written in English by the students after each class, which were corrected by the tutor to ensure good English skill. The course scores consisted of students’ performance on class participation, one-minute report, group assignments for PBL, a group presentation in OSU-CMU videoconference and their individual final report.
There were a total of 57 pharmacy students (1st year to 4th year) enrolled in this class and 44 students involved the presentation in the videoconference. The English writing skills and their logic flow to express themselves in the one minute report improved gradually for all students. From the students’, tutors’ and guest speakers’ perspectives, this course did perform well, in terms of course arrangement/content, teaching material and instructors/tutors and students satisfaction.
Although English challenged students to perform well in this course, the more practices the students, the more ability and readiness they were to play role in health care, health policy and medication use in the future.
