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).