Background When patients and healthcare professionals engage together in the use of medicines, medicines are used more appropriately. It is therefore important that healthcare professionals understand the patient perspective on medicines use and know how to integrate it into practice.

Purpose This project aimed to develop, deliver and evaluate innovative online courses, targeted for healthcare professionals dealing with the challenges of medicines use in patients, on how to understand the patient perspective on medicines use and how to integrate it into practice.

Method Researchers from the Universities of Copenhagen, Groningen, and Oslo, as well as Trinity College Dublin, and selected patients and healthcare professionals gathered into a kick-of meeting in January 2020. The ideas for the courses were developed in an Arena Blended Connected (ABC) workshop using Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) guidelines provided by Coursera. This workshop was facilitated by a professional from the Centre of Online and Blended learning (COBL) at the University of Copenhagen. The developed courses are delivered online, and will be evaluated using an evaluation survey developed specifically for the courses, and in focus group interviews with the course participants.

Findings Two online courses were developed. The first one, concerning the fundamentals of the patient perspective on medicines use, was launched on Coursera in September 2020. It lasts 4 weeks and consists of 4 modules dealing with: 1) societal challenges related to patients’ medicines use, 2) patients’ medicines use through professionals’ eyes, 3) patients’ stories on medicines use, and 4) introduction to the methods of how to explore and apply patients’ perspectives on medicines use. So far more than 500 participants have enrolled into this course, of which 30 have completed, and provided positive feedback. The second one, concerning the fundamentals of the use of interview methods to explore patients’ perspectives on medicines use, is a continuation of the first course, where participants conduct a small interview study. This course includes additional 4 weeks online with direct student-teacher interactions, and 3 days with face-to-face webinars in November 2020; 19 participants are enrolled into this course. The detailed evaluation the courses will be reported at the conference.

Conclusion Medicines are given to patients by healthcare professionals to take as instructed. In our courses healthcare professionals learn to appreciate patients’ perspective on medicines use, so the use of medicines can be tailored to each patients’ needs, leading to improvements in health outcomes. So far we have a great interest for our courses.