Status of Clinical Pharmacology Education in Korean Undergraduate Courses and Its Improvement

우리나라 학부과정에서 임상약리학의 교육현황 및 발전방향

The need and importance of clinical pharmacology education has in recent become enormous because of many reasons; 1) increasing demand of optimal drug therapy, one of major themes of clinical pharmacology, which aims to maximize therapeutic effects and to minimize adverse drug reactions, and also to reduce the cost in this process 2) explosive increase in the knowledge of currently-using drugs' clinical pharmacology and of therapeutic medicine technology, 3) increasing requirement of rational prescribing and reducing medication errors, 4) improving new drug development, 5) introduction of new pharmacotherapeutic knowledge using up-to-date techniques such as pharmacogenomics, etc., 6) the need of cultivating the ability to understand, evaluate, and to execute not only the current drug therapy but also the future drug therapy. The present status of clinical pharmacology education in Korean undergraduate courses was in this article discussed based upon the survey carried out lately in Korean medical schools and its improving measures were also described briefly. According to the survey, only about one fourth of responding medical schools had a separate or independent subject for clinical pharmacology education, with average teaching time of 13.5 hours, which is less than half of 28 hours for the average education time of clinical pharmacology in European medical schools surveyed already 14 years ago by WHO. The majority of clinical pharmacology education in Korean medical schools were done as a part of pharmacology subject with average education time of only 6.4 hours. Only 30% of the medical schools which had independent clinical pharmacology course had their own clinical pharmacologists. Other present properties of clinical pharmacology education and the problems in its education were also described. The current situation of clinical pharmacology education in Korean undergraduate courses has been shown to be severely lacking despite the need and importance of clinical pharmacology. Therefore, the teaching of clinical pharmacology in Korean undergraduate courses has to be increased a lot than now. The training of clinical pharmacologists is also urgently required. Other measures to encourage the education of clinical pharmacology in Korean undergraduate courses were also discussed.