Pharmacy students at Griffith University in Queensland Australia have been using our scrapbooks tool to build their awareness of patient experiences. Scrapbooks are a freely available tool on healthtalk.org that allow visitors to the website to create their own collections of our video, audio and written content based around patient stories. Video and audio appears in a playlist.

Dr Fiona Kelly and James Townshend at the School of Pharmacy at Griffith set their first year pharmacy students the task of creating scrapbooks in a placement-related course. They surveyed the students afterwards about their experiences of using the scrapbooks as a learning tool and the findings of the survey were reported as a poster at the 8th Pharmacy Education Symposium earlier this month in Prato, Italy.

The students at Griffith were initially shown healthtalk.org and spent time reviewing videos in groups during a workshop session. ‘You could see the light-bulbs coming on as student groups selected and viewed patient videos’ James told us. The groups fed back on learning points from the clips they’d seen and discussed the implication of those for their own future practice.

The students worked in groups to create scrapbooks on topics and for audiences of their choosing, while on placement. The students were encouraged to collaborate while using ICT, as some team members were on placement in remote rural areas or overseas.

Students chose to create scrapbooks to support patients and help them to feel less alone, to educate family and friends of patients, to dispel myths around certain issues such as vaccination and to educate other health professionals. One scrapbook focused on intensive care units from the patient perspective.

Of those who completed the survey after the course, the vast majority felt that their awareness of patient experiences had increased with some students expressing that the task suited their learning style.

James said ‘I planned to repeat this as an assessment item again next semester, but this time require the task to be completed before attending placement. We will still require students to discuss their scrapbook with placement staff, once again increasing awareness of [healthtalk.org]’.

See the full poster “Hitting the mark: Pharmacy students interacting with healthtalk.org to develop patient-centred practice“.