The Aston Diploma in Community Clinical Pharmacy contains a module on research methods that is designed to equip pharmacists for their future work in the evidence based primary care environment. A second objective is to support the aim of the RPSGB Task Force¹ to develop research aware practitioners. Pharmacists have been reluctant to engage in the module through fear, lack of confidence and knowledge². We wondered if this fear is peculiar to pharmacists. In autumn 2000, we had the opportunity to compare the attitudes of postgraduate pharmacists towards learning pharmacy practice research methods with the attitudes of postgraduate business students towards learning applied research methods.

40 UK pharmacists and 200 business students (many from overseas) were invited to answer a self-completion questionnaire, adapted from a previous study,² before and after studying a research methods module. 39 pharmacists (97.5%) and 153 business students (76.5%) answered the first questionnaire. The business students were younger than the pharmacists with a majority aged under 30 (85.5%) compared with 36% of pharmacists. However, there was little difference in the proportion of pharmacists (20.5%) and business students (23.5%) who had learnt about research methods prior to the module. There was a large difference in the number who had research experience; 18% of pharmacists compared to 54% of business students. Furthermore, only 20.5% of the pharmacists rated their knowledge of research methods as good or fair, compared to 43% of the business students. There was also a notable difference in confidence; 8 (20.5%) of the pharmacists were confident about conducting a small project, compared to 80 (52.5%) of the business students.

This study confirms our previous report that postgraduate pharmacy students lack confidence in their knowledge of research methods and in their ability to undertake research projects. Although there was no difference in the proportion of business students and pharmacy students who had prior-learning of research methods, business students were more confident in both their knowledge of, and their ability to undertake research. One possible explanation was the younger age of the business school students although within this sample of pharmacy students, there was no apparent relationship between level of confidence and age. However, a clear difference between the groups was in the proportion of students in each group that had research experience. The conference presentation will draw upon results from both the pre-module and post-module evaluations to consider the factors that may account for the differences between the two groups of postgraduates and their implications for the development of research active pharmacy practitioners.

1. The Report of the Pharmacy Practice R&D Task Force. A New Age for Pharmacy Practice Research Promoting Evidence Based Practice in Pharmacy. London: RPSGB, 1997
2. Wood KMG, Jesson JK, Wilson KA. Why a research module in the Clinical Diploma? The attempt to teach reluctant pharmacists. Belfast: 4^th International Conference in Lifelong Learning in Pharmacy, June 2000