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Another Side of Healthcare:
Oncology Pharmacy By Jennifer Yang Any pharmacy student can tell you that becoming a pharmacist opens the door to countless career options. As a first year interested in oncology, I jumped at the opportunity to join the RAMPS program because it gave me the opportunity to directly speak to a pharmacist who works in a specialty field that I am interested in. I was excited and eager to participate in RAMPS because I knew that RAMPS would provide an invaluable mentoring experience. I was paired with Dr. Kim Bergstrom, the Chief Clinical Officer for the Oncology Therapeutics Network (OTN). We met at Palio’s restaurant on the Parnassus campus, and I was immediately struck by how friendly and open she was with me, explaining her entire path from UCSF graduate to Chief Clinical Officer for OTN. Her background is extremely diverse, possessing experience in clinical settings, pharmacy administration, project and budget planning, and even formulary and purchasing decisions. She has worked in a wide variety of settings that range from Drug Education Coordinator at Kaiser to Director of UCSF’s Mt. Zion Center where she helped build its clinical program. Dr. Bergstrom currently works for OTN, a drug distribution network that functions between physicians and drug companies, effectively shipping oncology medications to physicians’ offices around the country. In addition to her duties with drug distribution, Bergstrom is also involved in helping oncology doctors build products and services, setting up guidelines for use of various cancer products employing evidence-based medicine and study outcomes, and developing technology that deals with ordering chemotherapy products and identifying drug-drug interactions. She also writes patient education monographs for medications or cocktails that are available to members (physicians) on the OTN website. These monographs are then passed along to oncology patients at these doctor’s offices. Hearing more and more about her responsibilities at OTN, I became increasingly interested in oncology pharmacy. I honestly had never heard of a pharmacist participating in the diverse roles that Bergstrom inhabits on a daily basis! Thus, I had to ask her what she liked and disliked about the job. She explained that oncology fascinates her because it is an exciting field that is intellectually challenging, for it involves a great amount of molecular understanding of mechanisms and drug interactions. Because a lot of money is spent on oncology drugs, a need for clinical pharmacists will always exist. As for any downsides to her job, she told me that her job involves a lot of traveling since she must participate in internal meetings, speaking engagements, visits to physician offices, and conferences at the American Society of Oncology. All in all, she finds her job to be exciting and challenging, for she must find new ways of tackling problems and designing programs from the ground-up. She never has a typical day at work because the field is always changing. As we were about to exchange goodbyes, Bergstrom wanted to leave me with some general advice. She used to be a pharmacy student once, and looking back, her advice is simple: explore your options, do not limit yourself and follow your interests. She recommends attending pharmacy conferences, networking with alumni associations and participating in a residency program. Above all else, pharmacy students should have no fear in exploring various career opportunities, volunteering and shadowing professionals to get a feel for that particular field of interest. After separating, I found speaking with Dr. Bergstrom to be an extremely eye-opening experience, re-affirming the reasons why I decided to participate in RAMPS. Jennifer Yang is a second-year pharmacy student.
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