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.