Assessing the pharmacy students' knowledge of genetic counseling with genetic variants that are associated with inherited disease.

Background And Purpose: To assess pharmacy students' understanding of the importance of genetic counseling through a didactic lecture and active in-class learning exercise in a required pharmacogenomics course.

Educational Activity And Setting: During the second year, students are enrolled in a two-credit hour pharmacogenomics course which is taught by multiple faculty members from various disciplines. The pharmacy students were taught the clinical importance of genetic results and counseling patients on their individualized reports by a clinical laboratory geneticist and a clinical genetic counselor. After completion of the didactic portion of the class, students practiced genetic counseling skills through role playing with clinical cases involving genetic reports. Students' knowledge of clinical applications of pharmacogenomic data was assessed prior to and following the counseling experience.

Findings: A paired sample t-test was chosen to analyze the data to determine if there was a difference in mean scores upon the completion of the lecture. There was a statistically significant mean difference between the total scores for the pretest (mean (M) = 37.89, SD = 6.66) and the total scores for the posttest (M = 48.33, SD = 5.24); t(140) = 17.53, P < .001, α = 0.05. The effect size for this analysis (d = 1.74) surpassed Cohen's determination for large effect (d = 0.8).

Summary: The genetic counseling lecture and activity increased the students' overall awareness of the importance of how sensitive genetic information is reported and delivered to patients.