IMPACT OF A SHORT-COURSE IN PHARMACOTHERAPY FOR UNDERGRADUATE MEDICAL-STUDENTS - AN INTERNATIONAL RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED-STUDY

Irrational prescribing is a habit which is difficult to cure. However, prevention is possible and for this reason the WHO Action Programme on Essential Drugs aims to improve the teaching of pharmacotherapy to medical students.The impact of a short problem-based training course in pharmacotherapy, using a WHO manual on the principles of rational prescribing, was measured in an international multi-centre controlled study of 219 undergraduate students in (Netherlands), Kathmandu (Nepal), Lagos Newcastle (Australia), New Delhi (India), San Francisco (USA), and Yogyakarta (Japan). The manual and the course presented the students, who were about to enter the clinical phase of their studies, with a normative model for pharmacotherapeutic reasoning in which they were taught to generate a ''standard'' pharmacotherapeutic approach to common disorders, resulting in a set of first-choice drugs called P(ersonal)-drugs. The students were then taught how to apply this set of P-drugs to specific patient problems on the symptomatic treatment of pain, using a six-step problem-solving routine. The impact of the course was measured by tests before training, immediately after, and six months later.After the course, students from the study group performed significantly better than controls in all patient problems presented (p