Pilot project to identify pharmacology core concepts in Australasia
Beginning in 2019, pharmacology educators based in Australia and New Zealand engaged in research that identified 20 core concepts of pharmacology education (White et al., 2021). This group, including some authors of the present article, initially surveyed 41 Australasian educators, of whom 23 engaged in follow-up workshop activities. Subsequently, an expert group of 12 academics extracted a set of core concepts, which were then refined and confirmed by a survey of an additional 30 academics. The resulting core concepts were then defined and unpacked (Santiago et al., 2021). This project provided proof-of-concept that core concepts could be identified in pharmacology, suggesting that such an approach might work at a broader international level. Building on the experience and findings of this Australasian approach, the authors were confident a more international approach would have the potential to be impactful at global scale.