Friends for four years and teammates for two, fourth-year pharmacy students Katherine Fuller and Courtney Baker coupled their pharmaceutical and communication skills to set them on track to the national American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Clinical Skills Competition in New Orleans this December.
Fuller and Baker placed first out of eight Auburn University teams in the local Clinical Skills Competition on Oct. 27, just as they did the year before.
Though the duo didn’t make it to the top 10 at the national competition in 2014, Fuller said the clinical knowledge they’ve gained from being on rotations, which is similar to an internship but at several medical institutions, will serve in their favor this year.
“When we got to nationals, we realized that mostly P4 students advanced to the top 10, so we felt if we re-competed we would have the experience necessary to be competitive even more,” Fuller said.
In the competition, teams are given a hypothetical case similar to medical records pharmacists use to provide diagnosis and treatment for patients, according to Pamela Stamm, assistant professor of pharmacy practice.
Using the Internet, one therapeutic textbook and a composite of shared resources for all teams, students have two hours to construct a written plan that ranks disease states in order of importance, set goals for therapy, pick the correct type and dosage of drugs and give monitoring recommendations.
The teams then give a two-minute verbal presentation of their written report in front of a panel of judges followed by an eight-minute period for the judges’ questions.
“(Fuller and Baker) were very prepared, they were very poised and they worked well together,” Stamm, a judge at this year’s local competition, said. “Their verbal presentation was extremely concise. They maximized the use of their time yet finished before their time was up, and that really helped them.”
After reviewing last year’s local and national scoring sheets, the two said they’re focusing on the higher scoring elements.
Fuller and Baker go through old cases to prepare for the written portion, though the competition cases are usually something they haven’t seen before.
Fuller and Baker said they focus on the main problem of the case together then divide and conquer with the less urgent problems.
Fuller usually performs the two-minute presentation before the two alternate answering judges’ questions since she has presentation experience from competing in Miss Alabama in the past.
“I was top 10 at Miss Alabama my last year, so through that process I did a lot of interviews just preparing for that,” Fuller said. “So that’s given me a lot of opportunities for public speaking once I had titles and then also to prepare for my state interviews.”
The ASHP Clinical Skills Competition, which takes place at the 2015 Midyear Clinical Meeting, reflects the local competition, except only the top 10 out of 129 teams from the written portion of the competition verbally present their plan in front of judges and attendees.
Baker said she’s confident in the makeup of their team and believes the verbal presentation is their area of strength, while Fuller said being in the competition together before has developed their trust as teammates.
“We know we’re both hard workers, we’re both determined, we both are really interested in the clinical aspect of pharmacy and we know each other’s personalities,” Baker said. “We just kind of click.”
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