Adult students completing a BSN degree have a variety of backgrounds and experiences. They are cognizant of the need for additional education and want to incorporate it into their current nursing practice. Thus, the goal for the development and teaching of this course was to acknowledge their prior experience, and use it as a foundation for expanding knowledge and promoting critical thinking in pharmacology, and pathophysiology. The students are encouraged to be active learners through the use of: (1) experiential learning activities; (2) a course related Internet site containing PowerPoint slides and links to key health care sites; (3) interactive faculty-student Internet discussions and activities; and (4) problem based learning activities using clinical case studies. Through experiential learning assignments, the students are provided with a case study containing demographic data, illness information, and current medications. The students must follow the patient’s life for a one-week period of time. They take candies as though they were the patient’s medications. During this time, they examine the lifestyle of a patient with this illness and these medications. This includes examining the following issues: 1) the cost of the medications; 2) the impact of medication side effects on their daily life; 3) the compatibility of over-the-counter medications with their medications; and 4) the effect of physiologic changes that occur with that particular illness. The students keep a journal, documenting their experience. During classroom time, there is a review of pathophysiology and pharmacotherapeutics for this disease process. Students discuss the challenges of dealing will an illness and medications as part of their daily life. Students also describe the difficulty that patients have in obtaining accurate, useful, medication-related information. At the completion of the course, the students indicated that these activities provided their most valued learning experience.
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