Taking Action Can Ease Job Disappointments
—Kate Traynor
BETHESDA, MD, 29 March 2001 — Soon after joining
the clinical staff of a community hospital, Keri
M. Justice, Pharm.D., found that the position offered
fewer opportunities in her specialty than she had
anticipated. But instead of quitting or dwelling
on her disappointment, Justice found a way to turn
the job into a rewarding experience.
When she accepted the job at Brandon Regional Hospital
in Florida, Justice planned on providing pharmaceutical
care to patients in the coronary care and medical
and surgical intensive care units. This would match
well with the pharmacy practice residency she was
completing at the Department of Veterans Affairs
(VA) medical center in Bay Pines, Fla. But in addition
to these duties, Justice learned after starting at
the hospital that she was responsible every other
weekend for pharmaceutical care in the labor and
delivery and neonatal intensive care units.
"I was from the VA and knew nothing about women
and children," Justice recalls.
But the biggest surprise in Justice’s daily
routine was responsibility for drug-therapy services
at two 40-bed step-down units. These telemetry units
supported about 100 patients a day when the hospital
was fully occupied.
After spending what she describes as "several
months…plugging my way along with interventions," Justice
decided to try to improve her situation. Her solution?
She asked to have a pharmacy technician assigned
to her satellite pharmacy.
"The idea was well received," Justice
says. When the technician came aboard, Justice found
that the scope of her work changed for the better.
She spent more time making drug interventions, working
on projects for the pharmacy and therapeutics committee,
participating in advanced cardiac life support as
part of the "code blue" team, and monitoring
for adverse drug reactions.
"The best part of my job—which I never
would have guessed," Justice says, "was
that I was responsible for all levels of critical
care pharmaceutical care, from order entry and distribution—including
making i.v.'s [intravenous admixtures]—to kinetics,
antibiotic surveillance, and committee work."
Justice has since moved to a new position as an
assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Nova
Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,
and a practice at the Manatee VA Primary Care Clinic
in Ellenton. But she has good memories of her experience
at Brandon.
"I learned a great deal from ‘making
lemonade’ from a not-what-I-imagined assignment," Justice
says. In the end, that job "was just what I
wanted and needed."
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