Students trial Mentor as teaching aid

Pharmacy students at Liverpool’s John Moores University (JMU) will be the first in the country to use the Mentor decision and knowledge support tool from primary care software supplier EMIS.

The Mentor system, already available to 55% of GPs in England, will be trialled as a teaching and reference aid by students and lecturers at JMU’s school of chemistry and pharmacy.

The school has a number of specialised laboratories for teaching pharmacy practice and pharmaceutical care and already uses computer aided learning packages to enhance student learning. Mentor, which helps students match symptoms to diagnoses, is an extension of the school’s current computer aided learning programme.

Janet Krska, professor in pharmacy practice, said: “We are delighted to have the opportunity to assess Mentor as a possible teaching tool within the undergraduate pharmacy course. We hope to work with EMIS in the longer term to tailor the system to meet our students’ needs.”

She added: “In the assessment of the Mentor system, over 250 students will use it to answer a range of clinical questions that may be faced by a practising pharmacist. We will be testing whether the system will enable students to answer the questions more quickly and thoroughly, obtaining a more rounded clinical view of patient problems.”

Mentor will provide JMU pharmacy students with access to over 84,000 inter-related medical terms including symptoms, signs and treatments matched to Read and SNOMED-CT codes. Amongst a wealth of resources and links, the Mentor system contains 6,000 core regularly updated, cross-referenced, research and information documents for healthcare professionals and their patients.

When users enter patient symptoms it provides:

• Possible diagnoses, with the most likely first

• Prompts for further questioning

• Articles and research papers for further reading.

Students will be able to revise and test their own diagnostic ability regularly, using an interactive quiz.

Dr Gordon Brooks, head of the EMIS unit that created and is supplying the Mentor system to JMU, said: “Mentor is an ideal system for health and medical care students. We are delighted that JMU’s school of pharmacy and chemistry is the first higher education establishment to investigate the system as a teaching and reference aid. We anticipate the product, already highly valued by GPs, to become a valuable support tool for pharmacists in the future.”