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).