pharming_in_korea | A little bit about our preceptors

An interesting thing to note is that we are actually visiting a research lab within the hospital. All our preceptors are Masters or PhD students, or professors in the lab. Before entering this program, all of them had gotten their BS in pharmacy (as pharmacy is still a BS degree in Korea) and are all licensed pharmacists. Each has chosen to specialize in either IMN or HO, and they do not switch between services.

While it is technically a research lab, our preceptors spend a lot of time working on patients. It’s amazing how hard working the preceptors are here! They are all involved in research, all the while taking care of their patients in their respective services.

Each service has four clinical pharmacy students. The “eldest” PhD students are the “leaders” of each service and are the main preceptors for their service. The four of us (Jason, Tae, Min Oh and I) are each assigned one student from each of the services to be our go-to preceptor while we are on service. The preceptors take turns taking care of the patients. On each service, one person would work up the old and new patients the night before, and be ready to present all the patients during the pre-rounds meeting. Then they would take care of the patient during rounds. That night, a different person would work up the patients in preparation for the next day. Basically, you took care of the entire service every 4 days, with the preceptors rotating. It was an interesting way of doing things – very different from the ways I’ve seen in done at UCSF, where preceptors would take care of a service for their assigned time length. For example, at gen med @ Mt Zn, we would have a preceptor assigned to the surgical floor and a preceptor assigned to the gen med floor for X weeks, and that preceptor would oversee the patients during those entire weeks (unless of course someone has vacation/sick days). I think I understand why SNUH is organized differently; because our preceptors are also graduate students, they need a lot of time to work on research, while still exercising their clinical pharmacy muscles.

Because we are students (with no pharmacy degree), we are not allowed to do anything but shadow on the actual hospital floor. In Korea, there are a lot of legal barriers preventing students from participating in a meaningful way. So while we will be using the EMR and following patients, we won’t be able to actually counsel or making recommendations directly to doctors. In Korea, BS pharmacy students do not get any clinical experience while in school. It’s a bit of a surprise to me: I never thought about what a privilege it was to be able to work and not just constantly shadow, thanks to our California intern licenses. I’m glad that we were able to get the experiences from our internships. I already feel a bit overwhelmed at the thought of being an official graduate and pharmacist in a few months’ time – I can only manage how much more anxious I would feel if I didn’t have my intern experience. Not only is it valuable work experience, I always found it interesting to talk to classmates and learn what they do and learn from their own internships, as there are a great variety of internship settings out there and one person can’t possible experience them all in the short time we are in school.

-Lena