UCMC Training Ground for Clinical Pharmacists

"Straight up fantastic!”

It’s quite the rave review of a pharmacy practice site, and it comes from those in the know: Tyler Vest, a fourth-year UC pharmacy student finishing up a clinical pharmacy rotation in trauma service at University of Cincinnati Medical Center (UCMC).

"One of the best things about UC’s Academic Health Center is that we have a place like UCMC literally right next door to our college,” Vest continues, describing how all of the critical care rotations at the hospital, a Level I trauma center, are highly sought after among pharmacy students. 

UCMC is within steps of the college and provides 90 clinical pharmacy rotations, with an additional 75 rotations at outlying UC Health locations. The majority of pharmacy students who rotate at UCMC come from UC’s James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy, but UCMC also precepts students from Ohio Northern and Ohio State University.     

"We have the longest record with UC because we started as the primary teaching site for all of the health college’s experiential education,” says UCMC clinical pharmacist and preceptor Kiranpal Singh Sangha, PharmD.

Pharmacy rotations here began about 50 years ago, he says, and started with general rotations such as medicine, surgery and ambulatory care. The program gradually expanded to include specialty areas such as neurocritical care which Sangha formed in 1991,and has 20-25 preceptors who oversee more than a dozen student rotations each month.

Other rotations include: medical intensive care unit, surgical intensive care unit, emergency department, oncology, anticoagulation clinic, psychiatry, cardiology, drug policy development and several others.

"We have very extensive choices here and the preceptors know how to transition you from a little caterpillar to a butterfly, by slowly providing you with the resources and exposing you to the process in a very individualized way,” says another very impressed fourth-year pharmacy student, Tara Lines.

"Even as a student, we are a team here and we interact with all of the providers,” says Lines, adding that by the end of the rotation "you have a level of independence that is just phenomenal.”  

Students here, Sangha says, get a "good exposure” to institutionally based health care.   

"We’re not just looking at their doses … we’re looking at their vital signs, their  blood sugar, what their physical exam looked like and pertinent positives and negatives relating to the physical exam,” says Vest.

The experiential learning program, Sangha says, is set up to provide students with both the knowledge of how a hospital system works and the training to determine whether clinical hospital pharmacy is the career path they see themselves taking.

"A lot of this you don’t see until you are with a pharmacist in this environment, so you spend the rotation really deciding, ‘Can I see myself here?’”says Lines, adding,  "You definitely have experiences you wouldn’t expect.”

For example, she says, a patient who comes in with an unknown bleed who is taking a blood thinner is going to be treated differently from a patient not taking a blood thinner who has a bleed from a car crash.

Vest says: "The Cincinnati and Midwest population is very diverse so you are not seeing one type of patient … the spectrum is so broad that even if they have the same injury the treatment may not be even remotely similar.” 

And sometimes the teacher is the student as well: "I learn something new here every day,” adds Sangha.