Toward a pharmacy curriculum theory: spiral integration for pharmacy education

The explosion of cumulative new molecular entities approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has more than doubled in the last 30 years, from approximately 700 in 1985 to a staggering 1,539 as of December 31st, 2015.1,2 Pharmacists are expected to be the “drug experts” of the healthcare team, providing insight on ideal drug therapies, doses, formulations, side effects, drug interactions, and patient counseling for each approved drug. However, with the ever-increasing new drug classes and the fixed amount of time dedicated to the didactic pharmacy curriculum, scholars have offered a few solutions including flipped classroom and asynchronous learning to proactively address the magnitude of drug information as well as other important pharmacist-related knowledge that must be imparted to students during their didactic curriculum.3 On the other hand, these strategies may not necessarily address the limited “contact points” in a curriculum for lesser known drugs, which in turn decreases knowledge retention rates. So the central question is: how can one design a pharmacy curriculum to take into account the cumulative rate of FDA approved drugs and provide multiple contact points within the curriculum to increase retention of drug information? The answer lies within two curricular words: spiral integration.