From Drug Knowledge to Therapeutic Competence: Active Learning for Competency‐Based Veterinary Pharmacology Education

Veterinary education has changed substantially over recent decades.Integrated curricula and competency-based veterinary education (CBVE et al. 2024) have prompted a transition from traditional didactic instruction to teaching focused on the development and assessment of clinical competencies.This is an important change that creates a particular challenge for pharmacology.Pharmacology is distributed across organ systems, species and stages of the curriculum; when it is integrated without deliberate design, the discipline can become fragmented, the education of its core concepts (Guilding et al. 2023) may be overlooked, and assessment may no longer incorporate meaningful pharmacological competence evaluation.The result is a risk that students learn lists of drugs without developing the reasoning required to select, prescribe and monitor treatment for patients.The eight contributions in this Special Issue offer practical responses to that challenge.Across different institutions, countries and learner groups, they show how pharmacology can be made visible within an integrated curriculum when competencies are mapped deliberately, learning is active and assessment reflects professional practice.Together, they support a central proposition: pharmacology should not be protected merely as a body of knowledge; it should be designed as a set of observable competences that underpin safe and evidence-informed therapeutic practice.