Encouraging Careers in Consultant Pharmacy

As a member of ASCP, your opportunities to introduce students to your profession are extensive. Consider joining the ASCP Volunteers in Participation (VIP) program, which offers many opportunities to become a mentor for students, teach classes in consulting or geriatrics, become a college liaison, or become a preceptor for students participating in clinical rotations. Other alternatives include helping to develop consultant pharmacy internship programs, ASCP chapters, and ASCP student chapters.

Pharmacy students need to be educated early in their professional careers about the different types of settings in which they may practice. As a consultant pharmacist, you should take advantage of every opportunity to interact with pharmacy students, whether through participation in career fairs and class presentations or by serving as a preceptor for students on clinical rotations. Don’t passively wait for students to contact you. Take the initiative and contact schools of pharmacy in your area, and if the possibility exists to speak to students, act on it! If you have exhausted these ideas and want to try something new, call student leaders within the schools of pharmacy—they have great suggestions for involvement.

If you practice in a clinical practice setting, you can volunteer to take students who are in clinical rotations on a tour of your facility. Once students are exposed to consulting, they often decide to stay in that area, so you may consider beginning internship programs for students, whether they are summer internships or continue throughout the school year. Internships are appealing to students because they allow them to gain experience in a specific area while still enrolled in school.

I have heard from many of my peers, as well as students I have spoken with throughout my residency, that they are unaware of the opportunities that exist within consulting. Students today need assistance in finding alternative areas of practice. Promoting these opportunities is a multi-step process.

Four Steps to Get Started

Second, if the opportunity exists, participate in teaching or organize a class that focuses primarily on geriatrics-related issues and consulting. In just a few years, the majority of patients pharmacists serve will be elderly, if that is not already the case. Geriatrics and consulting classes give students the opportunity to learn everything from how disease states are treated differently in elderly populations to how to perform a drug regimen review. Additional activities that may be integrated into these classes are medication pass observation, consulting activities, and disease mangement.

Third, consider becoming a preceptor for students in clinical rotations and introduce future pharmacists to the practice of consulting. When you act as a preceptor, you interact with students on a one-to-one basis, and the daily exposures to job responsibilities associated with consulting provide an excellent introduction to students who are still deciding where they will practice upon graduation. As a bonus, you get to work with new graduates who want to use their clinical skills, especially since the majority of today’s pharmacy school graduates have PharmD degrees and many have a broad base of clinical knowledge. In addition, when you act as a preceptor, you have the opportunity to educate these clinically astute students not only about daily clinical practice issues, but also about other characteristics of the profession, such as regulatory and business issues.

Fourth, ASCP members can institute new ASCP chapters that raise awareness, including student awareness, of the profession. When students see the enthusiasm that their state leaders in consultant pharmacy possess, they, in turn, become enthusiastic and are encouraged to initiate their own student chapters. Student chapters result in increased visibility of the practice of consultant pharmacy to the entire student body at a college of pharmacy.

Selected Services Provided by Consultant Pharmacists Primary patient care services Drug regimen review Nutrition assessment/support Durable medical equipment (DME) Surgical appliance fitting Drug research programs Pharmacokinetic dosing Pain management counseling Patient counseling Intravenous therapy Therapeutic drug monitoring Information/education services Quality assurance programs Drug information Inservice education programs Enteral feeding products Outpatient compliance packaging Home diagnostic services Laboratory testing Medication delivery systems Medical/surgical supplies Quality assurance programs Computer-generated forms and reports

How ASCP Can Help

Opportunities abound to educate students about the possibilities that exist within the practice of consultant pharmacy. By using some of the suggestions discussed above, you can encourage a future leader in the field.

Paula M. Baker
1999–2000 ASCP Executive Resident