Rotation 1: The Infamous Stay-At-Home Rotation

Posted by Unknown at Thursday, June 18, 2015

My first rotation was drug information.  I’d heard a lot about this rotation, so I was very excited to begin!  I was at a company that provides clinical information for users, and my focus was primarily on drug-drug interactions.

A Typical Day

I started the rotation mostly editing existing monographs and performing quality assurance on monographs that had not updated recently, but I gradually took on more responsibility and began writing more new monographs.  Requests for new monographs generally came from internal (other departments) or external questions, updated product labeling with new interactions, or articles that my preceptor or I happened to stumble across when researching another topic.  Two or three times a week, my preceptor, the other P4 on my rotation, and I would meet at a coffee shop (yum!) to talk about our work, discuss therapeutic topics and the drugs we were working on, research and writing strategies, and talk about life as a pharmacist.

I Didn't Just Write for 25 Days Straight

I didn’t just sit at home writing all day.  We had a Journal Club midway through the rotation, which was my first JC experience.  I also had the opportunity to poke around a little in the informatics side of the company and see where my monographs went once I finished writing them.  I was also able to work on a few pharmacogenomics projects and give recommendations based on my research, which I eventually wrote into a very different type of monograph.  In addition, I worked on a rotation-long project categorizing drugs based on levels of evidence.

Dusting off the MedChem

I unexpectedly found myself constantly challenged finding mechanisms of action, drug metabolic routes, and using this information to figure out how two drugs interacted with each other.  Some interactions were fairly obvious or were spelled out in a study or drug label, but others were not as clear and needed to be deciphered based on studies with other drugs or in vitro studies.  A few interactions had no evidence whatsoever, and the mechanism was left as “unclear, but the following mechanisms have been ruled out.”  I learned a lot about how drugs could interact, even in the strangest, most roundabout ways.

A lot of what this rotation boiled down to was writing, research, and coffee, which are three things I’m very fond of.  However, there were also many non-writing opportunities, and I was challenged in ways I didn’t expect to be challenged, most notably utilizing all of the medicinal chemistry I had tucked away in my brain a few years back.  If you like to write, I would highly recommend this rotation! 

Meetings, meetings everyday...

Posted by mariarx at Saturday, May 26, 2012

Week one of rotation one is done. Woo!

If I've learned one thing in my first week on the UMHHC Administration rotation, it is how to eat on the go. Running around the hospital from 0800 - 1700 with no break on day 1 was pretty overwhelming. Nothing like learning to swim by being thrown right in the pool. Besides the long day, I got the opportunity to see a full range of administrative task meetings - RFP presentations, team meetings, pharmacy practice rollout and planning.  My second trial by fire happened on days 2-4 since my preceptor, Dr. Brummond, was in the land of Badgers and I was braving meetings on my own. Most meetings have consisted of taking notes (about medication safety, pharmacy operations, IT, drug shortages, Joint Commission) and then looking up all the terms that I'm not familiar with.

Besides meetings with my preceptor, other administrators, and various pharmacy teams; this rotation includes a 5-week (or more) long project. Thanks to fellow blogger, Andre Harvin, the admin team has a database of over 6.5 million points about medication dispensing in the hospital. My job will be to compile a workload analysis; one of many projects that will be done with the data. The past day has been spent fiddling around with Microsoft Access and googling tutorials. Thank the internet for "Access for Dummies." Also, it stinks that Access isn't available on macs. Boo!

I hope to also use the next 4 weeks to work on my leadership skills, hone in what I need to get done for residency applications, and maybe even create a hospital glossary. I think that's all I have for now.... I'm sure the next 4 weeks will be a great roller coaster, and I'll keep everyone posted!

A Note About the First Rotation and What is Pharmacy School Like?

Posted by Matthew Lewis at Friday, July 29, 2011

Since this is my first post, let me introduce myself. I'm Matt, I've lived in Michigan my whole life, and got my undergraduate degree here at U of M. Right now, I have a strong interest in infectious disease (ID) pharmacy, as well as transplant pharmacy (mostly because of the ID aspect). I am excited and more than a little nervous about starting my first rotation. I'll be in the pediatric (peds) critical care ward of Mott in the University of Michigan Health System. It's a world renowned system and has all sorts of awards and highest level trauma centers. Basically, if a kid is really sick, they are coming to Mott. Being part of this system and the U of M pharmacy program coupled with the complexity of these patients means I have to bring my A-game. Another part of the difficulty associated with peds is they are not adults. Okay, that is obvious, but practically all of my classwork, all the studies I've read, and all the patients I have seen so far have been adults. Drugs work differently in kids than adults, so I have to make sure I've got pediatric dosing and efficacy in mind when working here and not stuck in "adult mode". It's sort of like being a mechanic for cars, but then switching to planes; everything you learned on one does not just translate to the other. I'm sure you've seen posts from my P4 colleague Jenna, who's crazy for peds, so if you want to learn more about pediatric pharmacy right this instant, (and who doesn't?) go check out her posts.

On another topic, some people have asked me what pharmacy school is like. I think a good analogy, at least for the academic part, is trench warfare. There are periods of digging in, where you just have to keep your head down. You find a close buddy or two who always has your back. There are times where you hear the whistle to go "over the top" and charge for the next trench, which can be the next set of exams or the next year. Oh, and in times of calm we celebrate, lots of celebration. Of course nobody is shooting at us though, so that is a plus.

Outside of the classroom, pharmacy school is incredibly rich and rewarding, and sometimes as educational as our academic portion, since you have the opportunity to meet, shadow, and have personal relationships with some of the superstars of pharmacy. I am not kidding, some of our staff are known around the world, other staff members have created whole new ways to deliver medications in the body, and others still have written chapters for pharmacy textbooks used around America. You also have so many opportunities to get to know your classmates while helping out the community. We have several student organizations such as APhA-ASP, HSP, and the pharmacy fraternity PDC among many others where pharmacy students go out into the area for health fairs and presentations, as well as the occasional purely social get together like the PDC ski trip(members only) or the PharmBash Ball organized by APhA. However, whenever anybody interested in going to pharmacy school asks me, I always end with, "Pharmacy school is what you make of it.", and leading up to the P4 year, I think I've put a lot into this program and it has given me a lot, and will continue to do so this year and beyond.