Persuing and Securing a Residency, June 2006

Chad Houghton , Meredith Jannsen

The completion of an ASHP-accredited pharmacy practice residency is an increasingly sought-after and important credential. A pharmacy practice residency or post graduate year one pharmacy residency (PGY1) is designed to help prepare pharmacists for the variety of tasks and the wide range of patients encountered in practice. Completing an accredited residency program helps you gain confidence and become more self-assured as a practitioner. Completing a pharmacy practice residency also provides a competitive advantage, helps expand your network, gain recognition among peers, and carves a path for the future. If you are not sure whether completing a residency is right for you, visit www.ashp.org/rtp/Seeking/why.cfm for more information.

Once you have decided to pursue a residency, choosing and securing a position in the program that will meet your career goals can be challenging. You will want to begin thinking about residency programs well before the fall semester of your fourth year to allow plenty of time to assess your options and decide on a strategy for matching at your preferred hospital or health system. ASHP provides a directory of links to the Web sites of all accredited programs at  http://www.ashp.org/s_ashp/residency_index.asp. Use this site to research and create a list of programs to which you would like to apply. As the fall semester gets under way, you should begin thinking about navigating the residency search process.

The ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting provides two very important venues for accomplishing this task: CareerPharm’s Personnel Placement Service (PPS) and the Residency Showcase. The Residency Showcase is a terrific forum to meet programs' current residents and preceptors in an informal session and to gain information about their programs and institutions. PPS is the largest in person recruiting event for health-system pharmacists, and many residency programs also conduct more formal interviews at this event. By participating in PPS, candidates obtain specific details about the program of interest, and the one-on-one interaction provides the opportunity to make a lasting impression. By the time PPS wraps up, residency seekers and residency programs can make an educated decision on how they will rank their selections for the National Residency Match Program (http://www.natmatch.com/ashprmp/) in the spring. The PPS Web site (http://pps.ashp.org) opens in late August, and all candidates can begin searching, contacting, and messaging for residencies participating in PPS as early as October.

Once you’ve decided on the programs you’re interested in you must participate in The ASHP Resident Matching Program (the "Match"). The Match includes both postgraduate year one (PGY1) and postgraduate year two (PGY2) pharmacy residencies and provides an orderly process to help applicants obtain positions in residency programs of their choice, and to help programs obtain applicants of their choice. Similar matching programs are in use in many other professions, including medicine, dentistry, psychology and law.

With the Match, applicants must still apply directly to programs they are interested in, and applicants and programs interview and evaluate each other independently of the Match. However, no offers are made by programs during the interview period. Applicants and programs can evaluate each other fully before the programs must decide on their preferences for applicants, and before applicants must decide on their preferences for programs. After all interviews are completed, each applicant submits a Rank Order List on which the applicant lists the desired programs, in numerical order of the applicant's preference (first choice, second choice, etc.). Similarly, each program submits a Rank Order List on which the program lists the desirable applicants, in order of the program's preference. Each program also indicates the number of positions the program has available.

The Match then places individuals into positions based entirely on the preferences stated in the Rank Order Lists. The result of the Match is that each applicant is placed with the most preferred program on the applicant's Rank Order List that ranks the applicant and does not fill all its positions with more preferred applicants. Similarly, each program is matched with the most preferred applicants on its list, up to the number of positions available, who rank the program and who do not receive positions at programs they prefer.

Since all offers, acceptances, rejections and final placements occur simultaneously; the Match is an effective and fair means of implementing a standardized acceptance date. It allows programs and applicants to evaluate each other fully before determining preferences, thus alleviating the pressures to make premature decisions based on incomplete information. Furthermore, the Match alleviates many common adverse situations from the recruitment process, such as applicants hoarding multiple offers, and applicants or programs reneging on a prior acceptance in order to accept a more preferred program or applicant that has subsequently become available. Also, a program can be assured that it will not be matched with more applicants than it has available positions.

Complete details on the Residency Match can be found here: http://www.natmatch.com/ashprmp/

Arming yourself with the right information and planning well early in the process will ensure that you maximize your opportunities for success in your chosen path.