Bringing Providers Into the Pharmacy Can Help Foster Better Relationships, Improve Patient Care
Rebecca Lahrman, PharmD, MS, BCACP, discusses her experience taking medical students for rotations in a community pharmacy.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rebecca Lahrman, PharmD, MS, BCACP, was working in a community pharmacy in Athens, Ohio. Lahrman, who is an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy at the Ohio State University, was asked to take students from a nearby medical school for rotations due to a lack of available preceptors.
The experience allowed Lahrman to show medical students the various difficulties pharmacists working in the community setting encounter on a daily basis. In a recent article published in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, Lahrman said it was “heartwarming” seeing the expression on students’ faces when their assumptions about pharmacy were challenged.1 Many of them walked away from the experience with a newfound respect for pharmacists and Lahrman’s own view of her profession was also enhanced.
In 2023, to her complete surprise, Lahrman became the first-year medical students’ preceptor of the year. She now encourages other community pharmacists to bring in health care students to foster greater relationships and improve patient care.
Lahrman, who is now an ambulatory care pharmacist at OhioHealth, sat down with Drug Topics to discuss her experience being a preceptor, what medical students can gain from experiencing pharmacy operations firsthand, how interdisciplinary experiences can impact the healthcare system, and what can be done to foster greater relationships between pharmacists and other health care providers.
“I told a lot of the [medical students] at the very beginning of the rotation that I needed them to learn one thing,” Lahrman said. “Being a provider is really hard. Being a nurse is really hard. Being a pharmacist is really hard. We need to be kind to each other in order to help our patients get where they want to go.”
