SJU Pharma Student Dies After Internship
- Thread starter jerseyshorejohnny
- Start date
beast of the east
Active member
At face value, both the school and the company have some liability. This does not appear to be a frivolous lawsuit seeking to place blame because of an unavoidable accident. I'm a little surprised to learn that an externship rotation included handling drugs at all, since we didn't do that in the past. The kid sounded like a great kid - very sad story. The school must do a better job at vetting preceptors for such externships. It appears this company was using students as unsupervised or poorly supervised workers.
beast of the east
Active member
Frank, as you are aware, the pharmacy curriculum includes 3 5 week externship rotations. I'm not sure how this is implemented today, but it was typically one inpatient, one outpatient (ambulatory or retail) and one specialty module of a student's choosing. I don't recall any of those scenarios where students were placed in dispensing roles, handling drugs. Inpatient placements are by and large hospitals, with a large infrastructure where safety is a paramount. It's very difficult to monitor all of the ambulatory and specialty placements without a sufficient staff on place for that purpose. I hope that SJU has thoroughly reviewed current procedures to avoid future events where students are placed at risk. Once you put students in externship rotations as part of curriculum, you need to do all that is reasonable to insure safety. We all know SJU has always skimped on infrastructure, so it is very likely they should consider increasing their ability to vet and monitor externship sites and preceptors.