Making Inroads: Outreach to Pharmacy Residents

Background: While many librarians find success embedding into the didactic curriculum, residencies can provide new challenges and opportunities, such as connecting with external preceptors and site coordinators; serving a unique body of researchers; and providing resources to users who are less traditional in the student-user sense. These factors can be compounded for pharmacy librarians, as pharmacy residencies are less common than medical ones – with around 67% of Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) students matching into residency nationally according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) in 2021. In this session, you will hear from four pharmacy librarians on their experiences with pharmacy resident programs, including initiatives for outreach, educational strategies employed, and collaborations with preceptors.

Description: While pharmacy residents are a unique subset of users, librarians can leverage the skills and connections they already have to build the foundation for a successful partnership with a residency program. Four pharmacy librarians will share what lessons they have learned, ideas for how to get involved with pharmacy residency programs, how to outreach to fourth year students (P4s) on rotations, and proposals for expanding involvement and assessing what these users need. Examples of these experiences include delivering an orientation to new residents that is specifically tailored to their resource needs, teaching topic development for research projects, and meeting with residents one on one to assist with their research. These efforts have been evaluated in various ways, including feedback surveys.

Conclusion: All four presenters have experienced some success getting involved with their residency programs, but there is still much that can be done. The experiences shared in this session aim to assist others who are looking to get involved with their own residency programs. Future goals of these pharmacy librarians involve a multi-site needs assessment of residency programs, research into formalized learning objects that cater to residents, and potentially pharmacy resident focus groups.