Careers in Pharmacy

Pharmacy Residencies

Renee Ahrens, Pharm.D., M.B.A.,
Community/Ambulatory Care Resident
Travis Pharmacy, Shenandoah, Iowa

Ahrens took advantage of a program at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, that allowed her to earn a Master’s in business administration and a Pharm.D. simultaneously. When she started her education she was “very focused toward the business side of pharmacy”; by the end she was more drawn to the clinical aspects. She decided to do a one-year community pharmacy residency for the varied experiences it offers.

Travis Pharmacy not only fills prescriptions but compounds medications, offers consulting to nursing homes, and provides clinical services to patients such as cholesterol education and monitoring, anticoagulation services, and blood pressure checks. Her great love, Ahrens has learned, is patient education.

“Working with patients is so rewarding, especially when you see someone struggle with a disease or medication and through your assistance they cope better or they avoid problems.” One patient, for example, did not recognize the importance of taking her warfarin regularly and having her blood monitored for prothrombin times until she started being cared for at Travis Pharmacy. “Now that she understands her condition and how warfarin works in her body, she’s much more compliant. And now we’re monitoring her cholesterol and blood pressure, too.”

As part of the residency, Ahrens spends one day a week in the diabetes education clinic at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and she will also get experience in internal medicine and geriatrics. Anyone considering a community pharmacy residency should enjoy working with people and have good communication and time management skills, she says. “You often have several projects going at one time, and you may get pulled from one task to attend to something else.” You must also be self-motivated, because no one will stand over you and push you, she points out. “But it’s great opportunity to try a lot of things and combine both clinical and patient-oriented skills.”

Sandy Tan, Pharm.D.,
Resident in Pharmacy Administration
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center , Beverly Hill, California

After graduating in 1996 from the University of California, San Francisco, Tan did a one-year residency in pharmacy practice at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center because she “wanted more clinical exposure and more hands-on experience, rather just than textbook knowledge,” she says. “ Long Beach has a broad spectrum of patients, from premature babies up to people 80 or 90 years old.” Now, at Cedars-Sinai, a 900-bed hospital with nearly 70 pharmacists on staff, she is doing a specialized residency in pharmacy administration that gives her experience with inpatient, ambulatory and managed care patients.

“It’s financial sacrifice, since I’m paid about half of what I get in a regular, but it’s worth it because I get much wider experience.” She picked pharmacy administration for her second residency because pharmacists today need both strong clinical base and knowledge of how to document their activities, Tan says. She works on many projects, including evaluation antiemetic usage for oncology patients, helping to determine pharmacists’ role in improving pain management, and assisting with clinical value improvement projects, which deal with quality assurance and cost reduction.

“Everybody is so eager to teach me, I feel as if I’m getting the best clinical pearls and learning far more than I would by spending an equal amount of time in one job.” Challenges include developing the ability to work well with different personalities and needing to put in long hours of reading and library research. She encourages students to consider the residency option, noting that “they need to open themselves up to opportunities and get exposure in as many areas as possible. Health care is definitely changing, and they need good skills to be marketable.”