Challenge

We have become increasingly aware that Pharmacy students frequently experience difficulties pronouncing drug names, and that there is a lack of consistency in the way both staff, professionals and students pronounced drug names. The School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology contains a student cohort with diverse language backgrounds. Whilst the majority of students are classified as domestic students, a large proportion of these are from’ English as Second Language’ backgrounds, and it is not known if their general English language skills somehow limits their abilities to pronounce drug names correctly, which could subsequently have an impact on their confidence during verbal assessment tasks.

In addition, we have observed that many 4th-year Bachelor of Pharmacy students are unable to pronounce many drug names at their point of graduation. This was found to influence their confidence and ability to discuss drug names during job interviews, leading to skilled graduates becoming poorly perceived in a competitive employment marketplace.

Previous literature on the development and science of generic drug name pronunciations is lacking, with most research primarily focusing on marketing studies of drug brand names to enhance prescription and recall for financial purposes. As such, we collaborated with Speech Pathology at the School of Allied Health Sciences who possess the disciplinary expertise to conduct a project researching verbal delivery skills. Thus, inter-school collaboration was a key element of our research project, which was named “DrugSpeak”.

Through the discovery of the key determinants of correct drug pronunciation, and the implementation of a research - guided workshop on phonetics delivered to students, we can begin to address the problem of poor and inconsistent use of drug pronunciations across all of our student cohorts to make them ready for professional practice in any health - based workplace where drugs are used.

Overall, our key research question was “Does a drug language tool improve students’ abilities to correctly pronounce drug names?”

Approach

We engaged in a preliminary analysis of the profession in order to explore the language of drug pronunciation, to inform the teaching of these skills to our students. We recorded the voices of clinicians and Pharmacists, and also monitored face and eye movements using technology that tracked these movements during the audio recordings. This helped guide us on the ways in which experienced professionals communicate, a relevant to drug pronunciations.

Approximately 40 student volunteers from the 2009PHM course were then asked to pronounce a list of 100 drug names that had been selected by Speech Pathology to provide a diverse range of phonetically different drug names. This allowed us to determine the level of quality with which students could pronounce these drug names at the beginning of the course.

Speech Pathology then provided students with video presentations that introduced them to the basics of word pronunciation, the use of word stress placement and an understanding of word syllables. They then delivered the “DrugSpeak workshop”, where students engaged in active learning sessions designed to help them unpack words so that they can appreciate basic phonetics and how it applied to drug names. This included their completion of a workbook, and practicing their pronunciations of hundreds of different drug names.

At the end of the university trimester, student volunteers once again supplied audio recordings. This was done to assess any effects of the DrugSpeak workshop and materials on their drug pronunciation skills. At each stage of the project, surveys were also conducted for clinicians and Pharmacists, as well as for students before and after the DrugSpeak workshop, in order to understand the effect of language and educational background on pronunciation skills, as well as perception of their own abilities, and their opinions on the DrugSpeak project itself.

Outcomes

The response rate of students was very high (>90%) for the completion of their audio recordings as well as their surveys. There was an almost full attendance at the DrugSpeak workshop conducted by Speech Pathology. Students were highly engaged throughout the entire workshop session, and reported very positively on surveys and during the workshop on the usefulness of the project on their abilities to pronounce drug names. Many students went so far as to say that the DrugSpeak tool should in incorporated into more of their university courses.

A very large amount of data was obtained from this study, and the data analysis is still underway. However, we will attempt to address a number of questions from the analysis:

1. Among clinicians/academics, are there variances, or consistencies, in drug pronunciations that will enable standardization of the way drug names are pronounced?
2. How do clinicians/academics speech deviate from, or conform to, the constraints of standard English?
3. Do student demonstrate improvements in pronunciation arising from intervention with the workshop and associated material? Are they more skilled in pronouncing drug names that they’ve never encountered before?
4. Is there any influence by student educational and language backgrounds?
5. Are there relationships between eye and face tracking data and the difficulty or ease with which words were pronounced by clinicians/academics?

Enabling Technology

We used face-tracking and eye-tracking technology with the School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology during the audio recordings for the clinicians and Pharmacists.

Implement

There are many ways in which you can make your idea come to life and be tested in a way that delivers real outcomes.Most importantly is exploring ways to collaborate with experts outside of your immediate area of expertise. Our collaboration with the School of Allied Health Sciences was absolutely essential in this project – their knowledge was the ley driver in delivering the information to our students so that they could enhance their skills in an area that is crucial to their own profession! This unique merging of expertise provided students with a learning tool that would be difficult or impossible to deliver by either of the two Schools alone. Now, we have a product that students enjoy, and, as reported by the students themselves, genuinely helps them!

Next Steps

We are in the process of designing “melodic maps” for students, which can be embedded online at L@G, and help students to practice their drug pronunciations. Students can play an audio recording of any drug name, and also watch how the pitch of the word changes as they move through the syllables.

We also aim to design a mobile phone app that incorporates a voice matching service. Once the app is launched, a drug name is selected, and students can directly speak into their mobile device. They then receive a “similarity score” which reflects how closely their pronunciation matches to the correct drug pronunciation. This will allow students to easily practice their pronunciations of drug names until they reach a high (e.g. >95%) voice-matching similarity to the correct pronunciations. This will provide an enormous amount of formative assessment opportunities for lecturers!

Contributed by

• Griffith Health
  School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology
  Matthew Cheesman
  (07) 555 29230
  m.cheesman@griffith.edu.au
  http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2306-0829
  Griffith Experts profile
• Griffith Health
  School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology
  Gary Grant
  (07) 555 29213
  g.grant@griffith.edu.au
  Griffith Experts profile
• Griffith Health
  School of Allied Health
  Elizabeth Cardell
  (07) 555 29570
  e.cardell@griffith.edu.au
  http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8327-1003
  Griffith Experts profile
• Griffith Health
  School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology
  Sean Alcorn
  (07) 555 27791
  s.alcorn@griffith.edu.au
  http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3533-6554
  Griffith Experts profile
• Learning Futures
  

Preferred Citation

Cheesman, M. J., Alcorn, S., Grant, G., Cardell, E., & Learning Futures (2019). The DrugSpeak Project. Retrieved from https://app.secure.griffith.edu.au/exlnt/entry/8128/view