The VA Salt Lake City Healthcare System offers both postgraduate year one (PGY1) general pharmacy practice and postgraduate year two (PGY2) psychiatric and ambulatory care pharmacy residencies. All postgraduate programs are 12 months in duration and accredited by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. The objective is to train residents for patient-centric clinical positions by advancing their knowledge, skills, and attributes in pharmaceutical care.
The PGY1 general pharmacy practice residency emphasizes inpatient ambulatory care and is designed to prepare residents for acute care or ambulatory care positions, adjunct faculty positions, or further PGY2 or fellowship training. Three resident positions are available each year for the general PGY1. The PGY1 includes core, elective, and longitudinal learning experiences.
The core learning experiences include VA pharmacy systems (3 weeks), internal medicine (6 weeks), primary care (6 weeks), critical care (4 weeks), management (4 weeks), and inpatient psychiatry (4 weeks). Unique to the program is that all three residents do the core VA pharmacy systems, internal medicine, and primary care at the same time. Residents have different preceptors, but for the first 15 weeks of residency, they work together with joint topic discussion, journal clubs, and so forth to ensure a smooth transition from student to resident.
The facility has a pharmacist integrated within almost every area. Each resident selects four electives. The in-house electives include acute care cardiology, anticoagulation clinic, emergency department, geriatrics, hematology/oncology, infectious disease, pain/palliative care, and multiple inpatient and outpatient mental health and substance use disorder electives. Another unique aspect of the program is its close affiliation with the University of Utah and Intermountain Health Care to provide additional specialty care rotations not available at the VA such as the Utah Poison Control elective at the University of Utah. In addition, if an elective is not yet established, they will work to create it for you. For example, I was interested in medication safety, and our RPD/RPC worked with the pharmacist to create an elective for residents.
Longitudinal learning experiences include inpatient central pharmacy (5 months), ambulatory care clinic (6 months), clinical weekend staffing (12 months), quality and medication safety (12 months), and quality improvement or research project (12 months). The first 5 months, you staff in inpatient central pharmacy once a week for 2½ hours and work on reviewing and verifying orders. You then transition into an ambulatory care clinic of your choice for ½ day a week for the last 6 months of residency. The required weekend staffing is unique because it involves completing admission medication reconciliations instead of central staffing. Residents rotate working every third weekend.
Other learning experiences include a medication use evaluation, which can be adjunctive to your longitudinal project; a 60-minute continuing education presentation; a poster presentation at ASHP Midyear; an oral platform presentation at Mountain States Conference; and an optional teaching certificate. Another important thing to note about the program is that residents get 4 project weeks throughout the year. These are extremely helpful because this is dedicated time for residents to work on things such as their longitudinal project, medication use evaluation, CE presentation, and ASHP Midyear poster.
I have enjoyed my PGY1 at the VA Salt Lake City so much that I early committed to their PGY2 in psychiatry. Please reach out to me, Jaycee Blair ([email protected]), or the program’s RPD John Gardner ([email protected]) if you have any additional questions or to obtain a recent copy of our brochure.