Pharmacy resident research programming at a community health system: Challenges, quality improvement, and outcomes

Numerous barriers exist to providing high-yield pharmacy resident research programming, especially at community health systems where research expertise and resources may be limited. The objectives of this work are to describe a feasible educational program structure that other community health system pharmacy residency programs could implement to improve resident research and scholarship skills, and to explore the impact of the programming on indicators of resident preparedness in research activities and system-wide pharmacist scholarship. We pursued a retrospective quality improvement study of a single community health system's experience with implementing and refining a longitudinal pharmacy resident research educational program. The program began at a single site in 2017 and expanded to a system-wide curriculum that now serves 22 residents annually across five hospitals. Structured as quarterly, system-level, single-day workshops, the educational program is designed to supplement and support site-level rotations through hands-on learning of high-yield skillsets. Assessed indicators of program success included resident survey evaluations of perceived program value and resident preparedness, pharmacist performance in the annual enterprise-wide research competition, and rate of system pharmacist-authored publications. A refined pharmacy resident research program is described, including challenges and worked solutions to success. Residents consistently rate the value of the learning experience highly and endorse favorable readiness for future research endeavors after residency (modes of 4-5 on 5-point Likert scale). The percentage of pharmacist winners of the annual research competition increased from 9% in 2014 to 100% in 2022. The annual rate of pharmacist-authored publications increased from 0 to 1 per year before 2014 to 17 in the calendar year 2021. Community health-system pharmacy residency programs can provide high-yield educational programming to equip residents with desired research and scholarship skills through creative and collaborative solutions to identified barriers. Health systems may also realize broader scholarly outputs from pharmacists and preceptors by supporting and lateralizing pharmacy resident research programming.