An attempt toward outcome-based education in medical pharmacology

The Japan Accreditation Council for Medical Education is the organization to evaluate medical education programs at each university based on the World Federation for Medical Education Global Standards for Quality Improvement. The practice of outcome-based education is one of the most important points in the evaluation. Each university is required to clarify learning outcomes, which are the qualities and abilities that students should acquire at the time of graduation, and the curriculums and the framework of evaluations to achieve the learning outcomes. With the publicization of common achievement tests for medical students prior to clinical clerkship, medical students can perform medical treatments during clinical clerkship except for the issuance of prescriptions. However, to properly issue prescriptions as a resident soon after passing the national examination for medical practitioners, medical students should acquire the qualities and abilities not only to understand the pathophysiology of disease and the pharmacological actions of therapeutic drugs but also comprehensively to grasp the relationships between the patient, family, and society. Therefore, pharmacology is inevitably involved in many learning outcomes as a hub in the horizontal integration of basic medicine and the vertical integration of basic medicine, behavioral science, social medicine, and clinical medicine. In this paper, I look at pharmacology education at the Mie University School of Medicine from the perspective of outcome-based education and consider the role that pharmacology should play in the evaluation of medical education programs.