Regional cooperation is crucial in times of economic downturn. In 2011, 14 out of 15 of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) states are facing dramatic cuts in their budgets and the trend is expected to continue. Despite hard times, students and their families in the West continue to benefit from hundreds of millions of…

While most of the more frequently used self-report measures of cultural competence in health professionals are targeted to practicing physicians and mental health providers from the majority-white population, no measures have been specifically developed for minority pharmacy students. With the objective to find a suitable tool to be used for…

Industry practices such as advertising, production of unsafe products, and efforts to defeat health legislation play a major role in current patterns of U.S. ill health. Changing these practices may be a promising strategy to promote health. The authors analyze 12 campaigns designed to modify the health-related practices of U.S. corporations in…

Introduction: Medical Education and Communication Companies (MECCs) represent approximately 21% of the providers accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), yet relatively little is known about these organizations in the greater continuing medical education (CME) community. Two prior studies described them,…

The goal of this study is to investigate the relationship between the preferred learning styles of professional pharmacy students and their performance/success in a hybrid PharmD pharmacy program making extensive use of online content. Consequently, the study will look for early detection factors which can impact the performance of the student…

This study examined the effects that online asynchronous dilemma discussions have on moral reasoning scores of pharmacy students. In contrast to face-to-face group discussions, asynchronous threaded discussions afford all participants time to reflect and respond during discussions. Anonymity features may lessen inhibitions in responding critically…

Introduction: In a physician-pharmacist collaborative-care (PPCC) intervention, community pharmacists were responsible for initiating lipid-lowering pharmacotherapy and adjusting the medication dosage. They attended a 1-day interactive workshop supported by a treatment protocol and clinical and communication tools. Afterwards, changes in…

This study examines interdisciplinary differences in final-year psychology, pharmacy and theology students' academic thinking and personal epistemology. The semi-structured interviews (n = 52) were analysed using content analysis to assess students' individual perspectives of the cognitive process of thinking, knowing and reasoning. The three…

[beta]-lactamases are hydrolytic enzymes that inactivate the [beta]-lactam ring of antibiotics such as penicillins and cephalosporins. The major diversity of studies carried out until now have mainly focused on the characterization of [beta]-lactamases recovered among clinical isolates of Gram-positive staphylococci and Gram-negative…

This study investigates fourth-year pharmacy students' experiences of problem-based learning (PBL). It adopts a phenomenographic approach to the evaluation of problem-based learning, to shed light on the ways in which different groups of students conceive of, and approach, PBL. The study focuses on the way students approach solving problem…

Pharmacotherapy of aphasia had been discussed for the last twenty years with first bromocriptine and amphetamine and then serotoninergic, GABAergic and cholinergic agents. Here, we reviewed the MEDLINE available reports of drug therapy for aphasia. So far, proofs of efficiency were found indubitable for none of the studied molecules. However, some…

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using an integrative approach to improve EFL students' communicative skill. This was done by comparing the oral performance of the subjects who were taught grammar, listening, reading and speaking integratively to that of the subjects who were taught the same skills…

This article reports that India's medical profession is in a crisis. For every 10,000 people in India there are only six doctors, compared with nearly 55 in the United States and nearly 21 in Canada. The problem is likely to get worse before it gets better. Professors are leaving medical schools for better-paying jobs in private hospitals and in…

The pharmaceutical products market in Mexico involves four main actors: health providers, health payers, patients and pharmaceutical companies. The relationship between health providers and the pharmaceutical companies that supply the products required to prevent and treat illnesses is of particular interest. This relationship can be described…

The purpose of this project was to evaluate the development and delivery of a hypertext case scenario document to be used as the capstone assessment tool for doctoral-level physical therapy students. The integration of Web-based collaborative tools (PBworks[TM] and Google Sites[TM]) allowed students in this all-online course to apply their…