Lezley-Anne Hanna

Ultimately, Dr Hanna wants to “ensure that future pharmacists are equipped with the knowledge and skills required to be safe and effective healthcare practitioners”.

It was only after completing her doctoral work in evidence-based practice that Lezley-Anne gained a greater appreciation that all aspects of her practice should be informed by evidence, which spurred her to start conducting research with undergraduate students. According to Lezley-Anne, “having an awareness of students’ attitudes and opinions facilitates a richer reflection on current teaching methods”. Initial work that she (and one of her collaborators, Dr Maurice Hall) conducted centred on gaining pharmacy students’ opinions on the feedback provision within the degree programme. LezleyAnne considers this area to be very important and explains that “there is evidence to suggest that feedback can have positive effects on learning and achievement and helps students maintain an interest in the subject. Also, if feedback is not provided within healthcare disciplines then patient safety may be compromised as mistakes can go undetected, there is no positive reinforcement for good performance, and ultimately the appropriate level of competence may not be achieved”. 25

Lezley-Anne subsequently won educational awards for feedback provision and contributes to the School’s high National Student Survey (NSS) score in this area. To aid with recruitment and retention, she has also investigated why students choose to study pharmacy as a career and the transition from secondary to higher education.

Furthermore, following the introduction of a code of conduct for UK undergraduate pharmacy students, and the growing emphasis placed on professionalism within pharmacy, Lezley-Anne and Maurice conducted research to ascertain students’ attitudes and usage of alcohol, smoking and social networking sites. She considers that the work “has revealed many interesting findings. For example, it seems that male students are prepared to engage in riskier behaviour than female students.” They also conducted other work to determine goal orientations of pharmacy students and whether there was an association between these and academic performance. “Again, differences were noted. High performers were more likely to be female than male, and the mean score for work avoidance was significantly greater for males than for females. From these findings it seems that we need to take a closer look at our teaching methods and adapt these if required to ensure that key messages are being delivered effectively to all students.” Recently, Lezley-Anne has been investigating the empathetic ability of pharmacy students, due to the growing realisation that empathy is a key component of the patient–healthcare professional relationship as it may improve patient satisfaction and contribute to optimal clinical outcomes.

In tandem, Lezley-Anne continues to progress her doctoral research on evidence-based healthcare and over-the-counter consultations; she cosupervises a PhD student who is conducting work in this area.

RESEARCH PARTNERS

• Queen’s University Belfast Scholarly Educational Research Network
• Northern Ireland Centre for Pharmacy Learning and Development