Pharmacy Lecturer, Nick Standen, is incorporating AI into assessment across La Trobe’s pharmacy practice subjects, helping students develop the skills they will need to critically evaluate AI-generated information in the workplace.
“The important thing is for students to be able to critically appraise AI outputs,” he says.
“We want the students using the models, but they have to know the content well enough to recognise when something is wrong or when important clinical nuance has been lost.”
As part of the assessment, students work in groups to use AI to generate a clinical case study, then develop a treatment plan for the fictional patient. They then presented and defended their treatment plan in a workshop, with experienced pharmacy academics questioning the reasoning behind their clinical decisions.
Third-year Bachelor of Pharmacy student, Lily Coulson, said the assessment showed her how AI could be used to create visual resources to support her learning.
“This assessment helped me learn how to use AI to make images by putting in my information and getting a visual diagram or demonstration to help me learn better.”
Nick says the assessment reflects the changing environment students are likely to encounter when they enter the pharmacy profession.
“Hospitals will increasingly be using AI tools, but ultimately pharmacists will still need to take responsibility for the treatment decisions they make,” he says.
“Students need to be able to use these tools but also defend the output and recognise and correct it when it isn’t right.”
