Daniel Malone
Thao Vu¹, Harjit Khera, Vivian Nguyen¹, Kiirtikka Kumar, Sangeun Lee¹, Ryan Guo¹ and Anoushka Sharma¹
 1 Monash University

Background
Medication-related errors have the potential to harm patients1. MyDispense is a pharmacy dispensing simulation developed to reflect real life pharmacy practice, whereby students can utilise their clinical decision making and dispensing skills without real patient consequences2. 

Summary of work
This pilot study aimed to assess pharmacy student performance in simulated clinical scenarios with or without interruptions. The data included MyDispense responses from 14 third year pharmacy students who voluntarily completed all scenarios in a community pharmacy setting within 30 minutes. A total of five virtual patients were presented either sequentially or were timed to interrupt the pharmacy students. Students performed history taking, made decisions regarding dispensing or recommending an over the counter product, created an accurate pharmacy label and provided patient education, or justified their decision not to dispense where applicable. Student answers were scored using a marking rubric. 

Results
There was a significant reduction in accuracy of history taking (t-test, p = 0.047), but no significant difference in labelling accuracy or clinical decision making in scenarios with interruptions compared to scenarios without interruptions. 

Discussion
Whilst results showed no effect of interruptions on decision making ability, the research finding could have been affected by the limited number of collected responses, and lack of incentive for students to complete the scenarios. 

Conclusions
Apart from a reduction in history taking accuracy, there was no association between student performance and interruptions. However, this pilot study demonstrates that MyDispense is a feasible simulation to assess whether interruptions affect pharmacy student performance. 

Take-home messages
Future plans include optimising incentives for students to complete MyDispense scenarios fully. MyDispense can be used as a learning and assessment tool to pre-expose students to interruptions in simulated clinical scenarios. 

References (maximum three)