The Benefit of Pharmacy-physician Cross Training for Medical Students
Interprofessional Student Poster Description: Communication and collaboration between different medical providers ensure the best possible patient care. This expands beyond the medical team, as patients are at the center of an entire network of multidisciplinary healthcare teams. Effective communication between these teams has been shown to contribute to higher patient satisfaction, reduced medical bills, reduced medical errors, and improved patient safety according to the Journal of Interprofessional Care. Although many health sciences programs have established their own interprofessional training programs to address these competencies, opportunities for cross-training across health disciplines are not guaranteed. This presentation hightlights the benefit of pharmacy-physician cross-training from the perspective of medical students.
Over the course of a four-week psychiatric rotation, myself and another third year medical student were allowed the rare opportunity to shadow the hospital’s clinical pharmacist one-on-one on multiple occasions. We arrived early to our shifts at the hospital and watched the pharmacist fill orders for the day while she educated us on the process of prescribing orders from the physician standpoint.
Observing and learning first-hand from a clinical pharmacist allowed us to delve beyond the standard scope of training. We learned how to correctly enter patients’ prescriptions and consider the nuances involved. We were educated on how to be more specific in our reasoning for placing orders, how to establish rapport with the pharmacist, and how to consolidate orders to improve patient compliance. We also learned about the Joint Commission’s regulations regarding pain assessment and management. We were able to observe the hospital’s revolutionary protocol to combat the high incidence of antipsychotic side-effects, which resulted from the collaborative relationship between the clinical pharmacist and psychiatrists.
This experience granted us the opportunity to work directly with clinical pharmacists and learn how to improve our collaboration as prescribers. We gained invaluable insight into pharmacy as a profession and a greater trust and appreciation for their knowledge and contributions to the medical team. We have also learned that clinical pharmacists depend on physicians as much as physicians depend on clinical pharmacists, deepening our appreciation. This experience has been tremendously valuable to our education as health care professionals and our positive feedback has prompted this hospital to implement interprofessional training opportunities for all rotating students in the future.
