Institutional Elective at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center
During my third block rotation, I had the opportunity to spend six lovely weeks in my home state of New Jersey. The Newark Beth Israel Medical Center aka "The Beth" is a 665-bed teaching hospital located in Newark, NJ. My preceptor during this rotation was the Assistant Director of Pharmacy Judith Estok, RPh. I had previously completed my IPPE rotation at this site so going into this rotation I was pretty familiar with the hospital and staff.
The Beth offers a comprehensive variety of special services including a robotic surgery center, kidney and lung transplantation, cardiology and cardiac surgery programs, geriatric and perinatal care. In addition to their numerous other services, The Beth is also home to the Frederick B. Cohen Comprehensive Cancer, the Blood Disorder Center, and the Children's Hospital of New Jersey.
Since this was a "Institutional" rotation, I had the opportunity to observe the many different roles pharmacists play in a hospital setting. I would spend about two to three days each week with a different pharmacist (ex. cardiac pharmacist, transplant pharmacist, peds pharmacist, staff pharmacist, IT pharmacist, etc.) unlike many other rotations where you end up doing the same thing throughout your rotation. The clinical and staff pharmacists were awesome and would explain why they checked certain labs and give insight on what they picked up while working at The Beth. During this rotation, I would also attend P&T and Hospital Committee meetings with my preceptor because of all of the drug shortages that were happening. I would join the IV room supervisor as well as the buyer to update the pharmacy drug shortage list and research possible alternatives.
If you are a student that loves compounding, I definitely recommend this rotation to you. On my last hospital rotation, I didn't get the chance to make any IVs or compounds. I told this to my preceptor, and she changed my entire schedule in order to spend my last two weeks in the IV room. [Note: Most hospitals don't allow students to make or mix actual medications since you need to have special training and certification, so you shoot sterile water into IV bags to simulate the experience or you use syringes and draw out volumes of the SWFI.]
The pharmacists and techs in the IV room told me: "You only learn from actually doing and you don't learn from simulating or pretending..."
Overall, this was a good rotation that provides a lot of learning opportunities. If you are looking to experience all facets of hospital pharmacy and work with some wonderful hospital staff, this is the site for you. There are not many sites that offer you the opportunity to rotate through Peds, ER, Cardiac, Lung, IT, Chemo,Transitions of Care and Administrative pharmacy. If you are thinking about a PGY-1 residency, this rotation gives you a little taste of what life of a resident is like. If you do get this site, The Beth has two PGY-1 Residents that can be very helpful on your "path to residency". You should definitely make sure you get to know them, because they know what it takes to get into residency. Since they knew I was interested in a residency, they brought me along on a code and went over some interesting cases they encountered. I don't know if I would have got such a valuable experience anywhere else.
If anyone has any questions about this site or any other rotation, please feel free to contact me @ mark.arroyo@students.acp.edu or Facebook.
