Why Complete a Residency

The purpose of a pharmacy residency is to prepare pharmacists for practice. Residency training is designed to provide residents experience working with a wide range of patients. Residency training also offers other advantages:

• A competitive advantage in the job market – More and more employers recognize the value of residency training. A pharmacist who has completed a residency will have a clear advantage over applicants who have not.
• Networking opportunities – Many opportunities arise for residents to establish or expand their network of professional acquaintances and contacts including preceptors and other residents.
• Career planning – During the course of training, most residents gain a clearer picture of what type of practice best suits them. Residency preceptors are committed to providing personal attention to assist each resident in further defining professional goals.
• Professional vision – Many programs also offer the opportunity to see how pharmacy is practiced in different parts of the country, by arranging for residents to visit other residency programs or by allowing residents to complete a portion of the residency at another site (e.g., acute care, community care, home care, long-term care, managed care, etc.).

The ASHP accreditation standard provides criteria that every program must meet in order to receive and maintain accreditation. Although the standard requires experiences in certain core areas (see pharmacy practice residency, in Glossary of Terms section), there is room for concentration in a practice area and for additional experiences. Programs vary in their strengths, but each program is flexible and can be tailored to meet the needs of the individual resident.

The Residency Project

Accreditation standards require each resident to complete a project. Completing the project requires formulating a question, creating a study design, conducting a literature search, perhaps performing a pre-study to determine feasibility and value, conducting the actual study, interpreting the study data, and presenting the results. This project may take a year to complete, and culminate in the final presentation being given at a regional residency conference. Some programs allow residents to work on several small-scale projects utilizing the same components.

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