The Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children is a full-service pediatric hospital with 190 beds, of which 100 beds are medical/surgical. The hospital offers all of the specialties of pediatric medicine, surgery, and dentistry. General pediatric and specialty clinics are also located on campus.

The inpatient pharmacy is a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week operation that processes an average of 600 orders a day. Also, there is an associated outpatient pharmacy that provides full prescription services to patients and employees.

This learning experience is designed to develop your skills in order to adequately process a wide variety of provider orders. At the end of the rotation, you’ll have training to process pediatric medication orders safely and efficiently. You’ll also improve your ability to communicate to nursing and the medical teams, and to supervise technical staff.

This is a longitudinal rotation experience, designed to develop your skills in providing drug information to health care professionals and to demonstrate proficiency in preparing investigational drug study monographs. You’ll develop and refine the knowledge and skills to meet healthcare professionals' needs for drug information in the health-system.

You’ll evaluate requests to add medications to the health system's formulary, and apply the principles of quality improvement to the medication-use process. You’ll also improve your ability to communicate drug information/investigational study information to the medical/pharmacy team.

Within this experience, you’ll be expected to answer at least 15 detailed drug information questions, complete one P&T monograph, complete one drug class review, and complete one investigational drug study monograph. Either the drug class review or the investigational drug study monograph will be presented to the pharmacy/medicine staff.

The General Pediatrics rotation will expose you to direct patient care for a variety of pediatric disease states, working with patients on the 3E and 3F units of the hospital (3E and 3F are general pediatric areas, with 3E’s emphasis on respiratory patients and 3F focusing on gastroenterology patients). You’ll work with medical residents, nurses, aides, attending physicians, and the precepting pharmacist to implement pharmacy care plans and to prevent and solve medication therapy issues.

You’ll alternate rounds daily on each side with the designated preceptor at the beginning. Based on performance, you may later round on one unit while the preceptor rounds on the other side. In addition to the General Pediatrics teams, you must also work with the pulmonary and gastroenterology (GI) teams who are covering patients on the two units.

The rotation helps you develop a variety of skills, including decision-making, teaching, and communication skills. You’ll also learn to develop treatment plans and work closely with the medical teams. These skills and the general disease states followed will help you on further rotations.

The goals of this residency are to optimize patient outcomes, reduce the emergence of antimicrobial resistance, and reduce costs associated with antimicrobial use. The Antimicrobial Stewardship team consists of Infectious Diseases attending physicians and an Infectious Disease clinical pharmacist. The team works in conjunction with Infection Control, Microbiology, and the Pharmacy Department.

This learning experience is designed to develop your skills to adequately provide pharmaceutical care in the area of infectious diseases (ID) to pediatric patients and to function as an independent clinician on the Antimicrobial Stewardship team. You’ll have the opportunity to learn about various aspects of pediatric ID as well as the operation and mission of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program (ASP).

You’ll spend time rounding with the ID consult team and the ASP team. The experience will involve the development of sound practice methods in order to provide competent, confident and compassionate pharmaceutical care to patients.

This is a core experience of your residency and will expose you to the evolution of organization-wide medication-use systems by applying pharmacy informatics principles, standards, and best practices. You’ll gain a basic understanding of the language and concepts of information technology (IT), equipping you to function in the interdisciplinary environment of informatics project teams to advance the professional duties and responsibilities of a pharmacy informatics specialist.

The informatics department at Nemours plays a critical role in providing clinical informatics expertise to support the Nemours strategy. Activities include participating in scholarly clinical informatics knowledge exchange, supporting clinical research and quality improvement, advancing clinical best practices guided by domain experts, and developing user competencies of clinical applications. An important component of the department’s function is to partner with IS to ensure an environment that enables clinical applications to perform optimally.

Pharmacists have unique, comprehensive knowledge about safe and effective use of medications. More importantly, pharmacists understand core pharmacy operations and have developed expertise in end-to-end medication-use management, including communication with other information systems. Pharmacists provide expertise to effectively translate and seamlessly communicate the language of medication use across the continuum of care. They can interpret and implement requirements to ensure safe and comprehensive medication order communication.

An experienced pharmacist is skilled in the use of electronic medication-order entry systems and has knowledge of human factor issues (e.g., interpretation of ambiguous clinical data) and development of interfaces to disparate applications and systems.

You’ll meet with the rotation preceptor for one hour every other week. This learning experience is designed to develop your skills in research techniques so you’ll be able to design, develop, implement, and assess a residency research project by the end of the residency. This project will be presented at the Eastern States Residency Conference, usually held in May of each year.

Meet with the rotation preceptor for one hour every month, and develop skills in leadership and pharmacy management. You’ll be involved in pharmacy and therapeutics meetings, management projects, budgeting, and will prepare a management project for presentation.

This learning experience is designed to develop your skills to adequately provide pharmaceutical care for up to 22 patients. You’ll review the pathophysiology and therapeutic treatment recommendations of disease states encountered, with emphasis on pharmaceutical management in accordance with national guidelines. You’ll improve your ability to design and implement treatment and monitoring plans and your ability to communicate recommendations to the medical team.

This rotation will also strive to prepare and motivate you to commit to lifelong learning in the rapidly changing health care environment. The rotation requires extensive readings and will assume an adequate knowledge base on the topics reviewed in these required readings. Time management and prioritizing tasks are essential for a successful and rewarding experience, as you’ll be expected to cover and be familiar with all the patients currently in the intensive care unit.