People often ask me what my day is like as a pharmacy resident. Some people ask because they want to know what they might be getting themselves in for next year (or the year after). Some people ask because they are curious about the role of pharmacy in a hospital setting. Some people ask because they have no idea what I do all day. The unsatisfying answer, of course, is: it depends. It depends on the rotation of the moment and the practice setting, and it also depends on the patient load. I work at a 500 bed hospital where the census is usually >95% full. Whatever the census is for the floor where I am working, I might have fewer patients with many needs or many patients with fewer needs, and this, of course, will dictate the pace of my day.
I don’t think my schedule differs to much from my friends who are residents except for I get up a little bit earlier in the morning than most to either get some exercise or get a jump start on my patients for the morning. Residents will tell you, we attend lots of meetings (much more so now than when we were students). My residency program tries to be sensitive to our schedules, but I still find myself in meetings several times a week for residency or pharmacy related business. This starts to create a bit of a balancing act—“how much of A will I miss if I do B” and “what will I have to give up to attend C.” You start to have to be in multiple places at once and eventually it starts to feel as though you are not very successful at being at any of those places. I have learned to “hypertask” as a resident—this term refers to a higher form of evolved multi-tasking which supposedly makes one the epitome of efficiency. However, I am starting to suspect that “hypertasking” is really code for doing a bunch of things at once and not doing any of them terribly well.
My day usually starts at 4:30 am. Sometimes 4 am (if I have to be at the hospital by 6:30 am and sometimes at 5 am (if I don’t have to be there until 7 am). Sleeping in to 6 am is a luxury I only reserve for weekends when I am not staffing. I will work up patients in the morning, before rounds, so that I am ready to make recommendations to the team during rounds. Rounds can take all morning sometimes. Sometimes we round in the afternoon, too. In between all the rounding, there are meetings (!), patient interventions, and charting. Lunch is usually on the go if it happens at all. I am grateful for the days where I actually get 30 minutes of time to clear my head at lunch time. I don’t usually get breaks, but I am told “residents don’t get breaks.” And from what I have witnessed as both an intern and a resident, I don’t believe pharmacists usually get them, either. No downtime = no breaks.
My day can (often does) run late. Sometimes to 5 pm or 6 pm. Sometimes I am done early, although I almost always have something pressing that needs to be done when I get home that is pharmacy or residency-related. Usually “finishing up early” means I get to go home and remote into work to work on my major project or other things related to my current rotation that I didn’t get to do and/or look up that day. Remoting into work is kind of like actually being at work…except that you are working from home with a cat on your lap.
But the beginning and end of my day are not as important as what comes in between. As a pharmacy resident, I am uniquely positioned on the front lines of patient care to make important life-saving pharmaceutical interventions for patients. I have been fortunate to have had many meaningful interactions with patients during my time as a pharmacy resident. I have caught some serious drug interactions, put patients on life-saving medications, recommended cost-saving therapies to save patients money, and educated my patients about wellness and proper medication use. However, the experiences that stand out in my memory are not the dramatic ones (i.e. where I point out a potentially dangerous medication error to the medical team on rounds) but the personal ones: Holding a patient’s hand during a difficult diagnosis, sharing a smile with a family member concerned about a loved one, giving a hug to an elderly patient in terrible pain, looking into the face of a patient’s wife who knows her husband has terminal cancer before he does—these interactions transform me as a practitioner as much as they do the lives of the patients that I care for. A day in the life of a pharmacy resident is another day to learn, grow, and develop as a clinician, but it also is a wonderful opportunity to make a real difference in patient’s lives. So bring on the 4:30 am alarm. I am ready for tomorrow!
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