In a couple of weeks, I need to give a lecture about drug surveillance to third year pharmacy students. A more detailed description of the class is appended below. Clearly, the type of motivational talk that Pat gives about generating evidence or calibrating methods is way beyond the grasp of this class, which is why I am struggling about how best to “dumb down” the intent of large-scale safety surveillance collaboratives. Hence my ask: Has anybody created content that they can share/post that would be appropriate as a very basic introduction to safety surveillance and/or any tricks about how best to present these concepts to a very naive audience? I will provide a post-mortem on this lecture later this month and provide any materials that I felt worked well.
Thanks for any help – Michael Kahn
They are 3rd year pharmacy students (~150 of them) and this is the last didactic semester before they go into their year of clinical rotations. The students have not had a lot of research exposure, with the exception of a required group powerpoint presentation and poster presentation on a research idea that they were mentored on by a faculty member to develop/design (not implement and without regard to feasibility of the design). Some of the students have had true research experiences, if they sought it out, but it isn’t required. However, they have all had exposure to basic research methods in their didactic courses, but mostly from the perspective of learning how to critique literature vs. design a study. They have had exposure to medication safety in the curriculum in which incidence reporting was discussed, which hopefully after reading the articles they understand it is distinct from surveillance.