An assistant professor in ETSU’s Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy recently received a grant that will help first-year pharmacy students better understand the unique needs of patients in the Appalachian region.

Dr. KariLynn Dowling-McClay is using a $2,000 ETSU Instructional Development grant to develop a series of video vignettes that will be used to engage students in thought and discussion about the social and behavioral determinants of health affecting patients in this area.

During the spring semester of the introductory course for first-year students, the curriculum focuses on patient-centered care. This includes helping students understand more than just medications and how they work; the course also provides an understanding of the patients they are treating and all of the factors that can affect their health.

“We frame this as the social and behavioral determinants of health,” said Dowling-McClay. “Generally, examples of these can be income, education, childhood experiences or food access. These are factors anywhere in the world, but there are some key things we look at here in Appalachia.”

While patient-centered care has always been a focus of the curriculum at Gatton College of Pharmacy, Dowling-McClay wanted to hone in on some of these factors that are unique to the region.

The instructional development grant she received has allowed her to work with a student organization called Buc Films, which is housed in the Department of Media and Communication in ETSU’s College of Arts and Sciences. Buc Films will produce the short vignettes, which will feature actors from ETSU’s Standardized Patient (SP) Program. SPs are trained to portray realistic patients, their family members or others to recreate scenarios accurately and consistently.

Using studies that discuss social and behavioral determinants that people in Appalachia face, Dowling-McClay will provide the standardized patients with back stories. The SPs will act out a series of scenarios that represent some of the issues that pharmacists might encounter when caring for patients.

“I was trying to figure out a way to take the (educational) material and show the students, ‘This is about real people. This is foundational information that you’re going to need to take forward,’” Dowling-McClay said. “The videos bring in a realistic patient component in a feasible way.”

The video vignettes, which are currently in development, will be implemented for the first time in the curriculum in spring 2020.

“Many factors contribute to patient health, and our students need to learn to talk to people about it and recognize that there is more to a patient than just the medication list or the health record,” Dowling-McClay said. “There is more to dig into to be able to give complete care.”