Abstract

Pharmacy students in Hong Kong face a common challenge of having limited opportunities to experience professional clinical practice and often till the final year. To better prepare them to communicate with patients, nurses and doctors, innovative pedagogy is needed to be deployed to allow them to have an experiential learning through immersive virtual reality (IVR), which can be used to enable pharmacy students with no clinical experience to have a personal experience with head-mounted headsets through working the interactive cases. Pharmacy students are required to interpret clinical cases and attend pharmacy ward round during year 3 and year 4 of study. There is still lacking systematic teaching material for pharmacy student on preparation of clinical cases, interpretation of clinical notes and clinical abbreviations, as well as assessment of clinical cases. The current proposal is a pioneer project in Hong Kong for the development of clinical pharmacy pedagogy using IVR techniques. We will develop the IVR teaching cases using the real-world patient cases that we have at the Prince of Wales Hospital. We will bring the clinical ward setting with real world practical cases into the classroom. Students will experience first hand clinical exposure in class with guided teaching material step by step to translate clinical knowledge in real practice.