[Development of clinical trial education program for pharmaceutical science students through small group discussion and role-playing using protocol].

The acquirement of basic knowledge of clinical trials and professional attitude in their practices is a general instructional objective in the Model Core Curriculum for Pharmaceutical Education. Unfortunately, the previous program of clinical trial education was not effective in the acquirement of a professional attitude in their practices. Then, we developed the new clinical trial education program using protocol through small group discussion (SGD) and roll-playing. Our program consists of 7 steps of practical training. In step 1, the students find some problems after presentation of the protocol including case and prescription. In step 2, they analyse the extracted problems and share the information obtained in SGD. In steps 3 and 5, five clinical case scenarios are presented to the students and they discuss which case is suitable for entry to the clinical trial or which case corresponds to the discontinuance criteria in the present designed protocol. In steps 4 and 6, the roll-playing is performed by teachers and students as doctors and clinical research coordinators (CRC) respectively. Further, we conducted a trial practice based on this program for the students. In the student's self-evaluation into five grades, the average score of the skill acquisition level in each step was 3.8-4.7 grade. Our clinical trial education program could be effective in educating the candidates for CRC or clinical pharmacists.