Pharmacy Microteaches

In pharmacy, we often change the packaging of medicines - most commonly to put into compliance aids. But what might this do to the medicines, is it important, and how do we balance the pharmaceutical needs of the medicines with the clinical needs of the patient?

Can we do this thing with medicines? Is it within the law? How can you approach these questions without getting bogged down in trying to read legislation (whilst also not just making things up)

Odds and odds ratios are often used to describe the results of clinical trials, but not many people, outside of statisticians, understand what they mean. So what do they mean, how do they behave, and how can we use them in pharmacy, when we're trying to explain how good (or bad) medicines are?

Medicines can interact with each other which may, or may not, cause problems for the person taking them. How can you go about tackling these sorts of questions and work out how best to manage potential interactions for your patients?

How do you make decisions with someone else in pharmacy? Using an awful example (you get called in the middle of the night by the neonatal registrar) we'll work out how we might want to approach shared decision making.

How can you think about tackling questions about IV compatibility, to make it easier for you to manage all the information you get?

How do you go about planning where to look when you're asked a question? Setting yourself up well at the start with a good plan can improve your chances of getting to the right answer - so how do you do that?

What can you do to make sure the questions you get asked in pharmacy make sense? How do you start off on the right foot to give yourself the best chance of getting to the right answer?

A relatively quick run-through about how to think about renal function, and how we use the measures we have to adjust medicines doses

Can you do critical appraisal of published articles, if you've only got access to newspaper coverage and the abstract? It's not ideal, but it's often what you've got, and you can probably do more than you think.