Pharmville 3052: anything but a soap opera

May 2009

The characters in Pharmville are poised to become an integral part of our students’ university learning experience.

Cast and crew of Neighbours… prepare to stand aside! The characters in Pharmville 3052 are poised to become an integral part of our students’ university learning experience.

Pharmville 3052 is a fictitious community of 26 individuals, devised by faculty staff and introduced to undergraduate Bachelor of Pharmacy students in first semester 2009. The benefit of this innovative project lies in its capacity to bring ‘real’ people with ‘real’ problems into students’ lives and learning experiences.

Each Pharmville 3052 character has a documented medical and social background that provides a distinctive platform and point of view for lecturers to illustrate disease states and their progression, physiological processes, and drug entities and groups.

Students are introduced to the families, encountering a human perspective to healthcare problems to increase their cultural awareness, confidence and preparedness for practice. Through the characters, students will also understand connections between the enabling science units and the practice based units in the course curriculum.

“Pharmville is an exciting initiative that provides context and relevance in our new curriculum,” said Associate Professor Jennifer Marriott (BPharm 1971), director of the Bachelor of Pharmacy.

She explained that a lot of work has gone into the project and its impact on the students has been highly anticipated by staff.

“Initially, the students were intrigued,” she said. “I believe they’ll continue to enjoy the connection that Pharmville creates between different units in the course.”

Images and videos of the characters will be embedded into the curriculum throughout lectures and tutorials as a tangible context for student learning. For example, drug molecules of the Pharmville 3052 characters’ prescribed medication can be used to illustrate chemistry lectures and provide a concrete link from the molecular structure through to the end-user, the patient.

A wide range of characters make up the Pharmville 3052 community. They include an ethnically Malaysian grandfather with high blood pressure and cholesterol, a single mother who works part-time and has two boys, and a socially isolated 37 year old man with epilepsy who lives at home on a disability pension. The diversity is designed to represent the average Australian community, with its multi-racial members and variation in health attitudes and social supports.

One Pharmville 3052 family – the Park family – was selected for extended development. With a gallery of candid video footage and still images of the seven family members, the family forms the visible face and entry point into Pharmville 3052 for students and lecturers.

A 20-minute film introduces the characters and illustrates the multidimensional impact of social and personal circumstances on health. A production crew was on location to bring the project to the big screen, but the project also drew on the talents of Monash staff. Academic staff wrote scripts to depict the multilayered lives of the characters, actors were cast to match the bi-racial family dynamic, and tight management allowed the filming to run smoothly.

As an extension of the community’s documented health and social history, the characters can also be explored in hypothetical scenarios to further study other health consequences and disease impacts. Lecturers can pose the many types of situations to students: What if… Steve developed cardiac failure…Maria, who is breastfeeding, develops shingles…Jason doubled his phenytoin dose. Students will then consider the impact of these changes in the context of the character’s situation.

Importantly, if students are learning, for instance, about health and ageing, health promotion and socially isolated, illicit drugs and risk taking, or childhood immunisation, there are Pharmville characters suitable to use as an illustrative starting point. Shane Bayer drinks heavily and takes antidepressants. What role does the community pharmacist have in this situation?...Sophia Tarantino is six months old. Which childhood vaccinations is she due for next?

Other offshoot initiatives are also underway, harnessing the energy of the Pharmville project. Four Pharmville characters are being developed as virtual patient avatars for third and fourth year communication tutorials, and video footage of the Pharmville characters in prescription interaction scenarios has been created for use in the virtual practice environment (VPE) spaces.

So, will Pharmville 3052 be to the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences what the 5000+ episodes of Neighbours are to its band of supporters? It’s unlikely that any of the Pharmville characters will become international superstars, but there is a vision that the Pharmville 3052 concept will become a highly successful teaching model, enthusiastically embraced by students.

Until then… it’s Pharmville 3052,
Act 1, Scene 1. Roll cameras!