From Jill Reynoldson

The ASHP Clinical Skills Competition was a great experience from the local level to the national level. At the local competition, things were low-key and relaxed. We had gone over the practice case beforehand, and we were surprised to find the local competition case was much more basic and straightforward. The patient had complications of diabetes and hypertension, both disease states that pharmacists commonly encounter. To my surprise, we took the full two hours to complete the case because we kept adding things that we remembered to the list. It was a great feeling to apply the things you learn about in pharmacy school and realize how much you retain!

At the national competition, things were a little more intense, but we were just excited to be competing and representing our school. The national case centered on a depressed patient who had overdosed on Tylenol PM. Though we did not make it to the final competition round (and we thought we should have!), the case was not beyond our knowledge base. It was interesting to meet all the different competitors from across the country and see their approach to a patient case. In addition, wearing the badge that said "Clinical Skills Competitor" was definitely a conversation piece with everyone at the convention!

I would definitely recommend participation in the ASHP Clinical Skills Competition to anyone thinking about it next year. For P4s, you will surprise yourself with how much you know and retain from rotations. For P3s, it is great preparation in working on patient cases and competing in the competition as a P4. We are so fortunate to have this program at Creighton!

Participating in the ASHP Clinical Skills Competition was a very rewarding experience and it was also a great learning opportunity. The competition allowed me to apply the knowledge that I gained from both classes and clerkships and to think like a clinical pharmacist. I would encourage everyone to take part in the local school competition as it helped me to think and solve the case with more confidence. Competing nationally at Las Vegas was little daunting at first but it turned out to be a fun and a valuable experience that I will remember for a long time.

Before entering pharmacy school, I prided my pharmacy knowledge on the fact that I could name the beta-blockers and that I knew things that ended in coxib did something to reduce inflammation. After P1 year, I threw empathic statements out everywhere. Then came P2 year and I prayed that I would get a question from the guys back home asking about what a certain drug did. If I even overheard the name of a medication that one of my friends was on, they got the history of the drug, what plant it came from, pharmacokinetics, mechanism, side-effects, and just about anything else that I could regurgitate. Afterwards, my friends would always give me that blank stare of confusion, thank me for filling their head with knowledge they really didn't want, and quickly change the subject. That undoubtedly led into my P3 year making the newest point ever so clear. It's not about the drug, it's about the patient. So we now get case-based scenarios in the notes and learn how to specifically treat that complication. But are we really treating the patient, or are we merely treating the single disease state of the patient?

The Clinical Skills Competition is our chance to put all these pieces together and treat the patient, not just the disease or complication. Oh yeah, winner gets a free trip to Vegas or some other place outside the lovely Midwest. Anyway, it would be a shame to learn all this wonderful knowledge (like the half-life of Digoxin, thanks Dr. Dowd) and never get to use it. Who else can come up with the idea for a party to eat a bunch of KFC so that the massive amounts of Tetracycline can make teeth glow in black lights? Not that I would ever do it, but at least now I know to watch for that if I see a patient on it. And after participating in the Clinical Skills Competition, I will always check the creatinine clearance when I see a patient on Metformin. Topiramate may not be the magic bullet cure-all for peripheral neuropathy, but it IS an option. And finally, the faces that are staring at you while you are giving your presentation are not waiting for you to screw up while explaining why you decided to discontinue the beta-blocker on a post-MI patient to put you through torture. They are there to help guide us into being the best pharmacy practitioner possible. So to anyone that is contemplating whether or not to compete in the Clinical Skills Competition, Patient Counseling Competition, or even Jeopardy or Pictionary put together by Creighton's finest organizations, it's not just the things we do RIGHT that will make us a better pharmacist.