Making 9 Months Count

This week was pivotal in our residency moving forward. My co-resident SJ and I are involved in a new residency, new for everyone involved. It was originally a “regular” PGY1 pharmacy residency, with half or more of our experiences inpatient and the rest outpatient. The idea was to have continuity of care from hospital to the community to ultimately reduce hospital readmits. Well, the hospital backed out at the last minute, so we are doing a community pharmacy residency. I think there wasn’t a lot of time to reorganize everything, and it also meant that the docs we had lined up for rotations were no longer available. Add to that the fact that we started in October, and that there is an additional adjustment period when you move to Hawaii. There is just more to do in preparing and in settling in here on the islands. The point of all this is that we got off to a slow start, a really slow start.

That’s where Bill Jones comes in. Bill was not only contracted to set up the residency and assist in it’s implementation, but he is also a mentor for SJ and I. Bill is considered by many the “father of residency” in the VA and has trained numerous successful and innovative pharmacists. He visited these past few days, and we met with him Monday night, 10 hours yesterday, and 8 hours today. We hardly left his side, and he talked the whole time, tirelessly sharing his knowledge, ideas and feedback. He discussed ideas for projects, for outreach, for quality improvement, for rotations, electives, etc, etc. He spent hours talking about resi-trak and how we can use it to push the residency in the direction we want.

He took the time to help us organize the goals and objectives into the different outcomes, which are designated for different blocks, or rotations. It can be extremely complicated, and we were all drowning in it, save him. He is our savior! I have gone from feeling pretty much hopeless about the future of the residency to quite confident we can do some amazing things. We now have some direction, and a task list with deadlines. It will be exciting to look back and see all that we have accomplished after the year is done.

We can now take the reins. Here’s to making the most of the next 9 months!