Hi guys, I have an interview for a hospital pharmacist part time position coming up. What kind of clinical questions should I prepare for? I only have retail experience for many years so I haven't worked in a hospital before so just rotation experience. I am looking for topics to review. Thanks
Hospital Pharmacy Interview
- Thread starter dmd20000
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what kind of hosptial job is it? strictly operations/product checking? clincal? hybird?
The biggest thing I would ask depending on the job is how do you plan on bridging any knowledge gap from retail to hospital?
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Do people actually give out clinical questions during interviews to interviewees?
I can teach clinical skills all day. I can't teach attitude.
You hire for attitude and train the skills later.
I can teach clinical skills all day. I can't teach attitude.
You hire for attitude and train the skills later.
It is a 500 bed non-profit teaching hospital. I saw it is for an inpatient position. I am not sure what I will be doing. What do you think?
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well- 1. Does the ad not give a job description 2. based on that- and your background, I am going to guess it is an operations type position - whether you agree or not, a place like that is going to want residency/hospital experience for their floor positions.
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agreed within reason.
You need some clinical background, but to straight up ask questions is sorta bush league in my opinion. I had one place give me case's then questions -but they were like super easy. 95 year old with srcr of 3 who has afib and UTI - MD asked you levaquin vs bactrim or other options - what is wrong with this?
I would ask in a more subtle way to get their background like 1. name an intervention you are proud of? 2. What do you do in a typical day? 3. Ever had a doc disagree with a recommendation? if so, what was it and how did you respond.
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I don't, but I also won't interview applicants without residency training or hospital experience.
You can be the nicest person in the world, but there's a baseline knowledge needed that I don't have time to develop (Edit: this is for a "clinical" position mind you)
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Depending how far out of school you are, you likely don't know what you don't know, so it's hard to say what to prepare for. If they indeed ask you "clinical questions" I recommend erring on the side of not guessing and instead explaining how you would find an answer (i.e. guidelines, hospital policies, ask a colleague, etc.).
Lots of hospitals are hurting for pharmacists to staff operational shifts and throwing otherwise unprepared people straight into the fire- you should ask what your training for this position would look like given your retail background.
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Definitely shows inexperience as a hiring manager if you're asking clinical questions in an interview.
Honestly, it's way easier to teach someone without a residency/superiority complex. Had a girl with a PGY-2 who didn't know that PO vanc didn't need vanc troughs. Eventually got termed, and a walmart pharmacist replaced her and has done far better.
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Sounds like poor vetting during the interview process.
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I guess we need to start asking if you pull vanc troughs for oral vanc on future interviewees. I rescind my statement about not asking clinical questions 😉
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I don’t understand how that is even possible. I would expect any student on rotations to understand why you wouldn’t need troughs for oral vanco and even in a situation where someone had that knowledge gap I would expect it to be very easy to teach why that is.
as a most recent PRN pharmacist, I can assure you that they won’t ask anything about clinical. The 3 questions that the pharmacy mgm asked me are ( and later my friends too):
1) Availability ( most important, they want you to cover weekends, holidays, etc)
2) Why choosing us instead of the other hospital that are 15 miles from south of us? ( cuz you are hiring, eh, they are not hellooo?)
3) tell me about yourself
1) Availability ( most important, they want you to cover weekends, holidays, etc)
2) Why choosing us instead of the other hospital that are 15 miles from south of us? ( cuz you are hiring, eh, they are not hellooo?)
3) tell me about yourself
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I interviewed for a per diem staffing spot one time where asked me about heparin dosing. They were impressed that i knew without looking it up. Feels like a low bar though.
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That PO vanco always gets people for some reason. Some pharmacists don't even know it exists.
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I mean, I'd love if retail pharmacists were consistently better hires than residency-trained pharmacists for inpatient positions but that's not the experience myself or other managers have had. Might need to reassess how your hire didn't set off alarms during their interview.
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honestly there are a lot of pharmacists in this world that shouldn't be pharmacists
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There should be no need for clinical questions during an interview for a staffing position. By the time you have secured an interview, the decision to hire you has been made, they just want to make sure you are not a nut job. They usually make up their mind in the first 90 seconds anyway, not much to say or do to change it the next 60 min.
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Stupid dummy pharmacists!!!
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Did she PGY2 in MTM or something?
Never worked hospital before but I would guess that the harder thing is to navigate hospital's politics and being singled out because you "came from retail." Not that the clinical stuff ain't hard but I don't think it is rocket science either, especially if you just work primarily in the basement.
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Maybe we do. I mean....er, I know we all have bad days and can't remember stuff we should know....but, there is other stuff that is just so basic.....I mean, I might call my kids by each other names, but I would never throw out a non-kid name. I might have a momentary glitch and be thinking not furosemide, the other diuretic that starts with B that is on the tip of my tongue (I'm really bad with names, but I know when I can't think of the name)
But someone being completely clueless about why po vanco doesn't need a trough (or peak! haha) level. This is as bad as Drug Topics publishing (twice!) the clinical question about a pregnant woman with hypertension, and the geriatric specialist pharm D answering that an ACE-I would be most appropriate 🙂oops:😳😳) I always want to know what colleges are graduating these people, because that is a massive fail, when a pharmacist is clueless about extremely basic knowledge. This isn't stuff like "what is ganciclovir's half-life" or "what is the recommended PPI to take with atazanavir/ritonavir if no other options are available?"...stuff that most pharmacists wouldn't know without looking up. Or a situation where new knowledge has replaced older knowledge, and an older pharmacist wasn't aware of the change (another Drug Topics columnist who bragged about calling a doctor and getting an RX for skin infection change from Bactrim, since Bactrim isn't effective against skin infections....a later column he acknowledged his error.)
Egads, I think about all the stuff I don't know, and I feel stupid sometimes. But hey, I can remind myself that yes, even as just a BS pharmacist, I know why po vanco doesn't need a trough. Or why ACE-I for a pregnant patient, or even a patient trying to get pregnant, is a bad idea.
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The only question I was ever asked (on a hospital job interview) was about monitoring for enoxaparin. Another low bar I would say.
These are all good questions. How did you handle/answer them?
One place I went to had an actual written test, I kid you not.
I'm pretty sure my first job asked me to do some quick napkin math vancomycin kinetics. Every pharmacist shift, even central staffing, was responsible for chart review, kinetics monitoring, code response etc. for a specific unit, so they wanted to make sure you could at least do the basics.
totally reasonable. i also had a place that hide oral machine gun questions about alteplase, heart attack heparin dosing. director did tell the guy to relax who asked.
What exactly is the difference between a “clinical” position and staff pharmacist? Are the clinical pharmacists going on rounds? Staff pharmacists still have to verify meds/have knowledge so not sure how they distinguish the tasks
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My current position that I've been at for 1.5 years, I had 2 "clinical" questions--one on naloxone counseling and one on ICS deescalation (since this is an academic detailing/population health type position). My last position (internal med), none at all. The one before that (also internal med), I believe I remember having a question on HIT. No idea if they ask clinical questions for staff pharmacist interviews, since I've never been on a panel for that.
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depends on the hospital, that term varies so much from place to place. A generic definition is a clinical pharmacist is the one who verifies orders, doses antibiotics, goes to codes, and rounds - operational pharmacist does product checking - but again, there is far from a set definition.
Anyone willing to take a look at my resume / cover letter? Applied for a hospital outpatient position, phased out as there were more competitive applicants. Heard there were 100+ applicants for this one position, so chances were slim anyway, but honestly thought I had a pretty strong background to transition from retail to hospital to at least get an interview.
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Interesting. I've also considered order verification on the operational side.
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exactly - some academic places almost have a three tired system
1. drug distribution
2. Order Verification
3. Rounding - teaching
Around here one academic place the clinical team doesn't verify orders - their competitor - the clinical team verified all their own orders and nobody can touch their floor's orders - I don't work at either
I've heard of that. Honestly, doesn't even make sense to me. How are you supposed to clinically monitor your patients when you don't even know what orders are coming in for them?
That could go either hard-on clinical pimp questions, or a normal interview. If it is staff, expect clinical work flow almost as much as a floor cclinical person in a small 100 bed hospital.
500 bed, teaching hospitals are a different animal--poor MD intern knowledge, particularly POE, very judgemental clinical decision turf war scenarios and enough cash to indulge aggressive pharmD recommendations, as opposed to building a pharmD--MD relationship for higher recommendation ratios.
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Part of the logic for rounding pharmacists to not verify their own orders is that they likely recommended many of them and thus it is nearly self verification. Having someone else do the verifying provides a double check. Not always the case, but it is what I have heard floated.
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wot wot?
ehh..if the rounding pharmacist is so insecure that they feel the need to have every single one of their orders double-checked by a different pharmacist, their competency needs to be questioned.
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Even at a retail level, it’s generally good practice to have a different person data check than the person who typed it. In a perfect world, typing, data check, fill and final product check are done by four separate people (doesn’t happen but yeah). And that’s comparatively a more menial task. Why not have two separate pharmacists check stuff if you have the staff?
My hospital experience is limited so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
1. They're not making *that* many recommendations compared to the number of orders the providers themselves order.
2. If the rounding pharmacist knows what they recommended and what to expect the order to be put in as. The verifying pharmacist has no idea, they just know whether it's an "odd" order or not, so it could very well be wrong.
3. In the evenings/nights, there is no "other pharmacist" double checking their recommendations, despite having to also verify their own orders.
4. If something were to go wrong with the order, who would the fault lie with? The rounding pharmacist who made a recommendation to the provider with no record, or the verifying pharmacist who's unaware of what was recommended to the provider but on record as verifying it.
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I'm going to get a T-Shirt that says: "I verify all my own orders."
Except I don't: Sometimes I'm on rounds. Someone else has to verify them or they'll sit for 2 hours. Sometimes I'm at lunch. If I wanted to work during lunch, I'd work for Walgreens.
That's fine if you're on lunch or you're on rounds. Somebody else *should* verify them. I'm mainly referring to the remaining 5-7 hours that they're available for.
I'm currently a unit-based pharmacist, though I've staffed full-time for several years as well so I've seen both sides of things at a few hospitals. Quite frankly, usually there's a lack of accountability for clinical pharmacists in terms of both productivity and improving clinical outcomes. I could honestly take 3-5 hour lunches with impunity.
It depends what they have them do. After rounds, is there med rec, d/c? How indepth is the recommendations? These teachng hospitals through every academic nonsense out there, like hematoma from trauma and d/cing a pt. desyrel, no history of seizures. MD relationships are key in non-teaching facilities, you have to cater to them. Coworkers can be petty with what they think is gospel on clinical pharmacology.
