Pharmacist Mock Interview
Practice 35 Pharmacist interview questions covering clinical scenarios, patient safety, and medication management.
Question 10 of 35
Describe a situation where you received constructive feedback on your work.
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Stephanie Baumhover, PharmD, BCPS is a board certified clinical pharmacist with over 20 years experience interviewing and hiring pharmacists in several practice settings.
The employer wants to know how flexible you are and if you have a good attitude and can adapt when needed. This is a great question to highlight your belief in teamwork, and your desire to see things from a big picture outlook. You want to describe a situation where you did your best, but another perspective added value. Everyone tries their best and feels like they have seen items from all angles. But more opinions and different viewpoints generally make for a stronger outcome. The employer wants to know if you can thrive with that mentality.
Stephanie Baumhover, PharmD, BCPS is a board certified clinical pharmacist with over 20 years experience interviewing and hiring pharmacists in several practice settings.
"I was working in the IV room and had set up my batch checking counter from top to bottom. I described this flow to the technician, and we agreed and started working. When my manager came through, they noticed I wasn't working left to right. They mentioned that doing it from left to right can minimize the potential for error due to the pass-through angle. I had not considered that before and agreed with them that I would make it left to right. My manager appreciated my ability to change on the spot and recognize another opinion with more experience."
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Anonymous Answer
When I first started working in a hospital pharmacy, one of my tasks as a decentralized pharmacist was to dose vancomycin. I remember a particular incident when I was dosing vancomycin for a patient who had a history of acute kidney injury. Being that the patient's renal function during that admission looked stable, I set them up on a standard regimen. A day later, their serum creatinine began to spike and I received a call from my clinical supervisor. He asked me why I had chosen to give the patient a full dose of vancomycin being that they had a history of AKI. I explain to him that the labs from the current admission looked fine (with exception of today's blip in serum creatinine). My boss emphasized how crucial it is to go back into a patient's chart if possible to look at historical serum creatinine values. Being that I was so new to the art of Vanco dosing, I had not done this. I thanked my boss for his feedback and we continued our discussion with the next steps to follow up. From that point on, I worked closely with my supervisor when I encountered complex patients like this one. We even worked together to revise our company's policy and procedure for dosing vancomycin.
Chad's Feedback
Excellent! It can certainly be difficult to receive negative feedback on one's work, but your response is exactly what the interviewer will be looking to hear "“ that you recognized your mistake, accepted the criticism, and took it as a learning opportunity to improve your own process, and contribute to the revision of the company's dosing procedure.
Anonymous Answer
While doing patient education outreach calls, I was moving down the list in order rather than grouping together patients getting the same medication. This was taking me a significant amount of time since I had to switch gears on my counseling points every time I called a patient. I noticed a colleague was moving a lot faster through her list so I asked her advice. She pointed out that I should group patients together that are getting the same medication and counsel on only one medication a day. I switched to doing it this way in order to streamline my process. I was able to double my call volume from her honest feedback.
Marcie's Feedback
Nice! This is a good example that shows you're open to making changes to your processes per feedback. How about a time when you didn't seek out feedback yet someone (like a manager) gave it to you anyway? Consider including this kind of example as well and describe how you responded to the feedback. The interviewer will want to know that you can handle receiving unexpected feedback and then use it to make improvements that will benefit the company. Good job!
Anonymous Answer
I had a patient who was taking warfarin at home and the physician had asked the pharmacy to dose his warfarin for use inpatient. While I had a dose that I verified with him and his pharmacy, he didn't mention to me or the nurse or physician that he had been eating a lot of spinach salads which can interfere with this drug. His diet in the hospital was different and his values were very high, so later after some investigation, I found out why his values were high and got some feedback from my supervisor about making sure to look at all aspects of the patient and their lifestyle, especially those that can affect these medications.
Stephanie's Feedback
This is a great specific example, but I suggest taking this one step further to show what the outcome of the feedback was. What did you do with this feedback? How did you incorporate this feedback into your work for the future? Adding a few additional details will help to round out your response!
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