Design of Spiral Curriculum for Pharmacy Students to Reach the Outcome

The third advanced workshop of the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan for pharmaceutical teachers was held from October 12th to 14th, 2013, and participants discussed an outcome-based approach to curriculum development in pharmacy education. In this article, I report the outcome-based spiral curriculum model of group 2A, which was designed to enable pharmacy students to understand a patient's condition, and to provide a basic practical ability in medical therapy. In the curriculum, pharmacy students will learn biochemistry and functional morphology in the first and second years, skills to interview patients in the third year, pathophysiology and pharmacotherapeutics in the third and fourth years, skills to estimate patient disease from physical examination in the fourth year, and practice in understanding real patient conditions in a clinical clerkship in the fifth year. The curriculum also included learning and evaluation methods.