Research team and expert group composition
The research team (PW, TA, CG, JK, LG) was formed at the beginning of
the process, and oversaw the Delphi process. The research team aimed to
recruit a minimum of 20 expert group members based on best practice
guidelines for “15 to 30 participants from the same discipline”in health sciences education research (De Villiers, De Villiers, &
Kent, 2005). In order to remove any conflict of interest, members of the
research team led discussions regarding potential core concepts but were
not voting members of the expert group. To select the expert group, the
roles and experience needed were first identified. Each member of the
research team was asked to invite experienced pharmacology educators to
participate. All expert group members selected met at least twoof the inclusion criteria shown in supplementary materials, Table 1.
Consequently, twenty-four pharmacology educators were recruited by
direct invitation from the research team to be members of the expert
group, comprising 14 women and 10 men, from a total of 15 countries
across six continents: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia,
India, Ireland, Japan, Lebanon, Malta, Nigeria, Qatar, Sweden, the USA
and the UK. Twenty of the expert group members reported their highest
qualification as PhD, two MBBS / MD, and one Pharm D. Fourteen members
reported a teaching qualification at Graduate Certificate or higher
level. Expert group members pharmacology teaching experience ranged from
2-60 years, with a median of 15 years.
The expert group used the Delphi method to identify core concepts of
pharmacology education, conducted under the approved protocol #31379 of
the Monash University Ethics in Human Research Committee. A
multi-faceted approach was used, in which the expert group were provided
with a range of resources to achieve the aim of ensuring coverage of the
entire field; deriving terms from a variety of sources to mitigate
personal biases, and including empirical data (text mining) and expert
opinion (educator survey).