Discussion
Our project has significance for the international pharmacology
community, in that a consensus list of concepts central to the teaching
and learning of our discipline was produced. This is the first time to
our knowledge that a truly international initiative has produced a
consensus list of discipline-focused core concepts. Over 200
pharmacology educators from 22 countries across six continents
contributed to the effort: 201 responded anonymously to the survey, and
there were 24 expert group members and 6 research team members. Given
the range and complexity of content and context, we employed a phased
approach to the identification of core concepts, building on the lessons
from other disciplines (Hott et al., 2002; Merkel, 2012; Michael et al.,
2017; Parekh et al., 2017; Tweedie et al., 2020; Zechmeister &
Zechmeister, 2000) and our own pilot studies in Australia and New
Zealand (Santiago et al., 2021; White et al., 2021). The exploratory
phase ensured that we covered the full scope of concepts in
pharmacology, by identifying 100 terms used frequently in pharmacology
texts and 590 terms from large scale survey. The research team then
analysed and refined these large lists to create a manageable 74
potential core concepts for the expert group to resolve. To ensure
genuine accord within the Delphi method, we set a high (80%) acceptance
threshold, providing confidence in the final list of 25 core concepts.
For comparison, a median acceptance threshold of 75% was reported in a
review of nursing Delphi studies (Foth et al., 2016).