How do pharmacy students describe decision-making about drug therapy?

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Introduction: Therapeutic decision-making is offered as a term to describe the responsibility that pharmacists have as medicines experts for making decisions about drug therapy for individual patients. There is a lack of research describing how pharmacy students learn to make therapeutic decisions. Methods: Qualitative methods were used to interview twelve final-year undergraduate pharmacy students. Data were analysed inductively to identify the steps in the process, the definition, and attitudes students learned about therapeutic decision-making. Results: According to these pharmacy students, the process and definition involve four steps; identifying medicines related problems via differential diagnosis, exploring treatment options, weighing up the options, and making a recommendation. Attitudes were confidence, open-mindedness, and bias awareness. Discussion: These findings align with a proposed model for therapeutic decision-making in pharmacy practice, however, this study did not determine if the students could apply the model in practice. Conclusion: These findings can be used as a benchmark for enhancing the pharmacy curriculum to include decision-making skills about drug therapy for future practice settings.