Cardiology Consult Service

The College is so fortunate to have so many gifted and dedicated faculty. Here is Dr. Sally Arif, Assistant Professor in Pharmacy Practice, describing her practice setting at Rush University Medical Center. Like all of our clinical faculty, Dr. Arif spends part of her time on-campus teaching, conducting research, and meeting with students. The rest of her time is spent at her clinical site providing care for cardiology patients.

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I am a pharmacy specialist on a cardiology service at Rush University Medical Center. My medical team receives complicated cardiac consults from a variety of medical and surgical services throughout the hospital. My job is to bring a pharmacy perspective when developing a care plan with the members of my medical team, which includes a cardiology attending, fellow, medical residents, and students. We have a diverse patient population with respect to age, ethnicity, and gender, and disease states, and my average daily census is 15 to 25 patients. As such, I make sure all drug-therapy issues are coordinated during the inpatient stay, and I work closely with my fellow pharmacists to facilitate communication of our cardiac recommendations. Education is also a large part of my role, whether as a preceptor to my pharmacy students on rotation, to my medical team through informal in-services, or to my patients when providing discharge medication counseling.

On the cardiology consult service, we are asked to see cardiac patients for a variety of reasons. We assist with the management of disease states, such as acute coronary syndromes, coronary artery disease, heart failure and cardiomyopathies, valvular disease, pericardial disease, and arrhythmias. While on rounds, my primary role is to optimize medication therapy by resolving medication related issues, assisting with medication selection, dosing, as well as monitoring for efficacy and adverse reactions. In addition to providing drug information and education to my medical team, I also spend a large part of my time educating my patients who maybe starting on complicated or new drug regimens for their cardiac disease states. Cardiovascular medicine is largely driven by evidence-based-medicine with numerous clinical trials and guidelines released on a weekly basis. I find it vital to keep up on the literature in order to make timely and relevant pharmacotherapuetic recommendations to my team. By working at a tertiary teaching hospital and serving as faculty at CCP, I find ample opportunities to provide up-to-date drug information and education to my medical team and students.

Knowing that heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the U.S. today keeps me motivated to contribute to the field of cardiology. Because many of these cases are preventable, my focus and satisfaction comes from my contribution to put off future cardiovascular events in my patients by minimizing their risk factors and improving their medication adherence. This maybe through simple acts like ensuring my heart failure patients understand how to appropriately monitor their weight and fluid intake in order to ward off future hospitalizations, or educating my medical team to make the appropriate choice in antiarrhythmic when treating atrial fibrillation. Just like many other pharmacists, my primary objective of practicing is to ultimately improve my patients' quality of life by providing optimal pharmaceutical care.