SimPharm: Authentic immersion and reading the world as a pharmacist

Learning to become a pharmacist involves, beyond acquiring knowledge, learning to “read the world” as a pharmacist. This value-laden act highlights what counts as salient for pharmacists and forms the base upon which they make professional decisions. In this paper, we contend that our case-based method, based on an in-house developed computer simulation SimPharm, offers a virtual world that can guide students in adopting the shared values of pharmacists. Using data gathered from three sources (pharmacists who had trialed SimPharm, postgraduate students who were assessed using this simulation, as well as undergraduate students who had engaged with SimPharm in a classroom context), we suggest that SimPharm's virtual world features a level of authenticity that has the potential to enculturate students to interpret the world as pharmacists do.

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