School of Pharmacy duo places second in national Clinical Skills Competition

by Chuck Gordon

Cameron Carter was wandering around Jackson Square in New Orleans the morning of Dec. 8, thinking about her long day of sightseeing ahead, when she remembered to check her email - just in case. She didn't expect to have made the finals in the national Clinical Skills Competition, but you never know.

She soon found herself sprinting back to her hotel.

Carter, a fourth-year student in the School of Pharmacy, and her competition partner, Jordan Saunders, another Wingate P4 student, had made the top 10, out of 133 teams. With Saunders having already left town for a previously scheduled vacation, Carter had less than two hours to prepare for the in-person finals.

Carter's knowledge and confidence impressed the judges, and the pair placed second in the competition, the best showing ever for a Wingate duo.

"These are the best of the best," Carter says. "You don't really think you're going to be the one to make it that far. It was exciting. With over 100 teams, even to make it into the top 10, we were thrilled."

"We felt we did well," Saunders says, "but we didn't know about top 10, because there were a lot of teams."

The annual Clinical Skills Competition is held as a pre-conference event associated with the American Society of Health-system Pharmacists' midyear convention. Competitors are given the details of a hypothetical patient experiencing a medical problem, and they have two hours to come up with a care plan, without using their class notes.

Students are given a list of lab work and any allergies the patient might have. Just as in a real-world situation they'll face one day, they had to factor in all those variables and come up with a suitable treatment plan.

The case they were given was complicated. The "patient" was having an oncological emergency: He'd developed neutropenic fever, a common problem experienced by chemotherapy patients, but even that emergency was complicated by another one - he had tumor lysis syndrome - and he also suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure.

"We had to be familiar with how to work up a patient, how to identify that they had problems in their labs, how to identify that maybe we needed to look at a specific guideline and see if their treatment was the most appropriate," Carter says.

Carter and Saunders are well schooled in working up such plans. They've been given opportunities to test those abilities as part of their regular clinical rotations as P4 students, and in the preceding three years they had worked up patient plans regularly in skills labs at Wingate.

"The big thing is having a lot of case-based stuff," Saunders says. "In skills lab all throughout the three years, we did a lot of case-based work."

The skills labs are part of the School of Pharmacy's revamped "blue curriculum," which was implemented just as Carter, Saunders and their cohort were starting as P1s. The curriculum puts a particular emphasis on cases and presentations in the skills lab.

Translating that work to the skills competition will make Carter and Saunders better pharmacists, says Dr. Michelle Chaplin, pharmacy professor and associate dean of academic affairs.

"The skills they used in assessing a patient and then determining an appropriate plan are something they will use every day in patient care," she says. "They also got practice presenting in front of a crowd and defending their choices, which will serve them well working with other healthcare providers or providing presentations in the future."

Working on cases in the lab is a different beast from standing in front of seasoned judges and defending your pharmaceutical plan for someone having a medical emergency. In the finals, Carter had two minutes to provide a rundown of the team's plan before facing Shark Tank-like questions from the judges.

Saunders says she had complete faith in her partner.

"Cameron is a really good speaker and really good at standing in front of people and presenting," she says. "I was confident in her. I had no doubt she would do great."

Saunders and Carter each say that, as students in a rigorous, demanding program, their self-confidence flags from time to time. The second-place finish, they say, will give them a boost as they apply to residency programs next year. They graduate in May and are looking to continue on as residents - Carter in psychiatric pharmacy, and Saunders in critical care or emergency medicine.

"As a student, you often feel imposter syndrome," Carter says. "To realize that, even though it wasn't a real, live patient in front of me, I have the ability to provide somebody excellent care, at the end of the day that's what I care about the most. And I think this has really shown my ability to do that."

"Cameron and Jordan are hardworking, talented students who take their studies seriously," says Dr. Sue Bruce, dean of the School of Pharmacy. "They are a strong collaborative team and used their critical-thinking skills, pharmacotherapy knowledge and available resources to evaluate a complex patient case and develop an evidence-based treatment plan."

Dec. 17, 2024

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