Student team to compete in national clinical skills competition

Eugene Lukienko and Nina Dang will compete in the 2012 ASHP National Clinical Skills Competition.

wo UM pharmacy students will soon compete in a national clinical skills competition.

"This is a great opportunity to use all the theoretical knowledge we gained from years of pharmacy education and apply it to patient cases," said Eugene Lukienko, who is enrolled in the fourth year of the professional pharmacy program. "It will give us the chance to represent our school and to show our competitiveness to other teams. I believe with enthusiasm, initiative and a great clinical skills experience, anything is possible."

Lukienko and Nina Dang, also a fourth-year professional student, will represent the pharmacy school at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Midyear Clinical Meeting in Las Vegas. They are advancing to the 2012 ASHP National Clinical Skills Competition on Dec. 1, after winning first place in UM's local competition in October.

"It was hard to believe that we won first place in the competition at Ole Miss," Dang said. "It was a very exciting moment when I got the call from Eugene. I didn't expect it because all of our competitors were so talented."

The Mississippi Society of Health-System Pharmacists, which sponsors the local competition, is providing all of the winning team's travel expenses, and ASHP is waiving registration fees.

Katie McClendon, clinical assistant professor of pharmacy practice, said that with 15 student teams participating, it was the largest local competition since she began her role as ASHP chapter adviser six years ago.

"The way the competition works is that the students are in teams of two, and they're given a patient case to evaluate," she said. "They have two hours to make clinical recommendations of how to optimize the patient's medications, determine what kind of monitoring they would do and what medications they would start or stop."

Within the two hours, the students must read through their case, determine the disease state, rank the patient's medical problems, develop a treatment plan and handwrite their plan for the judges. Travis King, assistant professor of pharmacy practice and former clinical skills competitor, said that this is a high-pressure situation for the competitors. King placed in the top 10 in the 2009 national competition and is serving as coach for Dang and Lukienko.

"The most difficult aspect of the competition is time management," he said. "You have two teammates who both want to work on all the disease states, but sometimes you have to fractionate those job responsibilities. Knowing how to do that and getting it done within two hours is really tough."

King said that the patient cases could also be very challenging.

"The cases could be anything," he said. "For example, our year was a patient who presented to the clinic with an acute onset shortness of breath – basically a heart failure exacerbation. It's really up to the students to pick up on the nuances of the case and figure out the issues needing to be addressed without being spoon-fed the disease-state specifics."

McClendon said she believes that competing nationally will benefit the students in a number of ways.

"It's one of those things that you can put on your CV and be proud of," she said. "If you do well, it can help you get noticed at various residencies. It's also a great experience working as part of a team. We always encourage our students to work together because it's so important in the pharmacy profession today."

Dang said she's looking forward to the midyear meeting.

"I always try to participate in as many competitions as I can because I gain so much from them," she said. "They are always a learning experience. I'll be happy if we win or lose, because I'll know that we did our best and had a great experience."