Comparison to ASCEPT list
As the current study builds upon the foundation initiated by the Australasian pilot (White et al., 2021), it is of interest to compare and contrast the two lists of core concepts. The pilot study was conducted by a group of educators from Australian and New Zealand, only one of whom participated in the expert group in the current study. The present final list includes 15 of the 19 core concepts from the pilot study, namely: drug absorption, concentration response relationships, drug distribution, drug target, drug metabolism, mechanism of drug action, drug efficacy, drug selectivity, drug affinity, drug tolerance, bioavailability, drug potency, therapeutic window, drug elimination, individual variation.
Our current list does not include pilot study core concepts drugs and homeostasis, drug excretion, drug safety, and drugs and complex systems. Our current list does however include 10 core concepts that were not included in the pilot study: drug half-life; volume of distribution; steady state concentration; agonists and antagonists; drug clearance; drug interaction; zero and first order kinetics; drug-receptor interaction; structure-activity relationship; adverse drug reaction. The observed differences in the lists may be linked to the different methodological approaches taken, or the differences between Australasian and international expert views. Interestingly, the termsvolume of distribution and drug-receptor interactions were both derived in our study from the text mining process, and reached the consensus threshold in our study. The Australasian study did not involve text mining.