Teaching basic and clinical pharmacology to medical students: a 2006 survey in French schools of medicine

This survey was organized in 2006 in France in order to investigate the status of the core curriculum of basic and clinical pharmacology (BCP) teaching hours (TH) in the 6 years training of medical studies. An open questionnaire was sent to 37 pharmacological teams with a 100% response rate. The results of this survey showed that the national mean number of TH is 67.6 per student, i.e. a mean of 11.3 TH per year per student during the 6 year training program. There was a wide dispersion of TH between universities with extremes ranging from 141 to 24. BCP of major classes of drugs was the leading subject (mean 35% of total) followed by general principles of pharmacology (33%), pre-clinical and clinical pharmacology (15%), pharmacology of mediator systems (9%) and miscellaneous subjects (8%). The time allotted to BCP teaching program is considered as insufficient in most of medical schools where it is less than 100 TH. New methods of active learning for students should be developed in the near future (integrated problem-base learning), and students should be trained to construct their knowledge-base via an access to pharmacological data-bases. Major changes in teaching BCP represent an important challenge for pharmacologists.