What is the most satisfying aspect of precepting students?

Seeing trainees grow and develop as great humans first and foremost, and then seeing how they develop in their professional careers. It is most satisfying to see them excel, enjoy what they do, and exceed my achievements.

What are some teaching pearls you have learned over the years?

With any trainee, the goal is to have a great knowledge base and clinical application/skills. To get there can vary as all students may be at different levels. One piece of advice I learned for teaching/precepting is to adapt to the need of trainee. This can be difficult in a clinical setting when precepting/teaching is secondary, but finding ways to provide these tools upfront can help facilitate the training and make it much easier. A quick example may be to use lectures/online/virtual resources for direct teaching if that is what students need. Ultimately, the more effort a student puts into the learning experience, then I put in more as well. 

Explain how your team and facility benefit from precepting our pharmacy students.

We are enriched by being able to play a small part in the professional development of our students.

What challenges do you see as a preceptor for pharmacy students?

Like most preceptors, balancing clinical/professional duties while ensuring a great learning experience for students is challenging.

How do you structure rotations to promote successful student outcomes?

First and foremost, we have great administration support to ensure we have everything we need to provide the learning environment for students and residents. This is much needed to ensure we have some time for teaching without affecting patient care.  We also have ongoing preceptor development available for all of our preceptors so we can all continue to grow and learn to be better mentors for our trainees. Specifically for ambulatory care, we incorporate case and journal club discussions, but these are more similar to active learning. We critically think through caring for a patient and learn how to evaluate a journal club to come up with a clinical decision for patients. As a quick example, SOAPing in schools don’t always focus on patient-specific assessments and this is what we detail in our case discussions. We treat it more as a learning tool to facilitate critical thinking and assessments. These components supplement the direct patient care and can become tools for student's continued development throughout the entire 6 week rotation. We provide ongoing feedback to trainees with structured mid-point evaluations, but try to provide the tools to preceptors to provide weekly feedback. This ensures continued development, and limits surprises during final evaluations on expectations and grades.  

Describe a situation you have had with a student, either positive or negative, that resulted in a better experience for the student, a better understanding being a preceptor for you, or made a difference in a patient’s care.

There are many such situations, but the scenario I love most is when students feel like they are not performing up to their own standards at mid-point evaluation and then with some guidance/direction, they are able to improve over the course of a rotation. This happens a lot during a challenging rotation.

What advice would you give to new preceptors of pharmacy students?

There is still a lot we need to learn as well, so it is okay to not know and to continue to learn along with our trainees.

Are there some specific challenges for future pharmacists you feel are important to address with your students?

Yes, particularly in job growth and outlook. The most important thing would be to ensure we get value for the work of clinical pharmacist practitioners. Also, being active and vocal about provider status and understanding of RVUs (relative value units) for billing. As a clinical provider, not having RVUs for seeing patients for a disease state limits ability for job growth in our profession. The profession needs to increase training programs, and specifically prescribing experiences. Provider status has different requirements for each state.  However, residencies such as PGY2s are ever important. If we don’t have enough training programs to offer experiences with prescribing privileges, how do we plan to be providers with RVU status? It is nice to get provider status licensure with alternative forms of training, but in my opinion, it does not replace clinical or residency experiences.