Hospital Pharmacy - April 2018 - 114

114
role of health-system pharmacists and the increasing availability of PGY-1 pharmacy residency-trained pharmacists.4
Despite all of these trends, there are limited data to describe
current PGY-1 program designs and how programs may be
evolving in recent years to meet the changing landscape of
acute care pharmacy practice. To gain understanding of these
issues, we developed a survey with the following primary
objectives: (1) to describe current residency program design
at academic medical centers; (2) to discuss changes made to
residency programs over the 5-year survey period; and (3) to
characterize PGY-1 pharmacy residency graduate career
choices over the 5-year survey period.

Methods

Hospital Pharmacy 53(2)
were also asked in pairs and asked about different PGY-1
pharmacy resident career path choices during the 5-year survey period.

Survey Administration
The survey was granted an exemption by the Institutional
Review Board at our institution. The final survey was uploaded
to an online survey tool and was e-mailed to PGY-1 pharmacy
residency program directors within the Vizient academic medical centers with an invitation to complete the survey. The survey was initially distributed in January 2017 and 4 additional
reminder e-mails were sent at 2-week intervals to those who
had not completed the survey to improve overall response
rates. All survey responses were completely anonymous.

Study Design
A list of Vizient-participating academic medical centers with
ASHP-accredited PGY-1 pharmacy residency programs in
the United States as of January 1, 2017, was compiled.
Vizient University HealthSystem Consortium is the largest
and most comprehensive network of academic medical centers in the United States. Vizient was utilized as a means for
obtaining a list of academic medical centers in the United
States.6 Residency program director e-mails were identified
using the ASHP Online Residency Directory. A total of 109
Vizient academic medical centers with ASHP-accredited
PGY-1 pharmacy residency programs were identified.

Statistical Analysis

Survey Development and Content

Of the 113 Vizient Academic Medical Center members, 109
had ASHP-Accredited PGY-1 pharmacy residency programs.
Forty-nine (45%) programs responded to the survey. Five
responders did not have a PGY-1 pharmacy residency program for a full 5 years prior to the survey and were excluded
from data analysis. Table 1 displays the characteristics of the
hospitals and residency programs among included responders. The hospitals varied in size, ranging from 200 beds to
≥1000 beds. Most pharmacy residency programs had been
ASHP accredited for greater than 15 years (70.5%). Table 2
displays required and elective learning experiences, which
varied greatly between pharmacy residency programs. The
majority (≥50%) of pharmacy residency programs required
residents to rotate through internal medicine, administration,
orientation, critical care, research, ambulatory care, and
pharmacy operations learning experiences.
The number of PGY-1 pharmacy resident positions offered
increased over the 5-year survey period from a median of 4 to a
median of 5 positions (P = .001, Figure 1). The percentage of
time spent on teaching experiences also increased over the
5-year survey period from a median of 5% to a median of 10%
of time (P = .001, Figure 2). The percentage of time spent on
internal medicine and elective learning experiences varied
greatly among residency programs. Residents spent a median of
10% of time on internal medicine learning experiences and a
median of 40% of time on elective learning experiences. Overall

A 32-item questionnaire was developed by the authors. The
questionnaire was reviewed by 4 external residency program
directors to ensure clarity of the survey questions. The survey was revised based on feedback from the reviewers. The
questionnaire is summarized in the appendix. For the purposes of this survey, staffing was defined as any time spent in
pharmacy operations, order validation, or a dispensing role.
Internal medicine was defined as inpatient adult or general
medicine. Academic medical centers were selected to survey
in an effort to investigate a targeted group of institutions with
similar clinical practice environments.
The survey was divided into 3 sections, each of which
contained questions that fulfilled the study's objectives. The
first section contained questions to assess PGY-1 pharmacy
residency program demographics and design. The second
section contained questions that assessed key changes that
have occurred within the pharmacy residency program over
the 5-year survey period. The 5-year survey period was
defined as the 2011-2012 residency academic year to the
2016-2017 residency academic year. These questions were
asked in pairs and sought to evaluate different characteristics of the programs over the 5-year survey period. The third
section sought to characterize future training and career
paths among PGY-1 pharmacy residents. These questions

All data were aggregated and analyzed using IBM SPSS version 23.0 (IBM Corporation, Chicago, Illinois). Statistics
were selected based on the distribution of the data. Descriptive
statistics were used to present the results. Data were nonnormally distributed and were analyzed by the Wilcoxon signed
rank test and reported in median and interquartile range. All
tests were 2-tailed and a P value of less than .05 was chosen
for statistical significance.

Results

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospital Pharmacy - April 2018