Developing, implementing, and evaluating the effectiveness of a sleep health educational module for pharmacy students

Objective: Pharmacists need sleep health knowledge and management skills to deliver evidence-based treatments to patients with sleep disorders/disturbances. This study aimed to develop, implement, and evaluate a pedagogically informed, interactive sleep health educational module for pharmacy students. Methods: An educational module utilizing a flipped classroom approach, with an interactive lecture, student self-reflection of sleep patterns, case discussions, and pharmacist-patient role-play scenarios, was designed and implemented. A questionnaire assessing pre/post-module changes in knowledge about and attitudes toward sleep health as well as post-module learning satisfaction, was administered to all participating second-year pharmacy students at an Australian university. Results: Mean total knowledge scores for participating students (n = 125, 70.4% female) improved significantly, from a baseline of 11.1 ± 3.8 to 17.1 ± 3.5 post-module (range: 0-25). Attitudes toward sleep health were moderately high at baseline (28.8 ± 3.2) and improved marginally post-module (29.4 ± 3.8) (range: 10-50); however, this increase was insignificant. Participants expressed high satisfaction with the module through subjective feedback, and post-module reflective statements indicated plans for changing sleep behaviors. Conclusion: The results of this study have shown that a targeted educational module for pharmacy students improved sleep health knowledge. It appeared that positive attitudes toward sleep health were not significantly increased which may reflect a ceiling effect. Future modules should focus on attitudinal aspects of positive sleep health to enhance pharmacists' skills in providing clinically related sleep health care to patients with sleep disturbance.