Even 1,800 miles away, a hop-and-a-skip from the Mexican border, Sara Shahdoost Moghadam still hears things about the pharmacy program from which she graduated in 2019.
Tucson, Ariz., may be a long way from northeast Indiana. But Manchester University’s Doctor of Pharmacy Program makes the leap in style.
“I’ve heard things a couple times, because I’m not the first Manchester grad to work at El Rio or as a resident at El Rio,” says Moghadam, who started work in July at El Rio Health/University of Arizona in Tucson as an advanced practice pharmacist. “And I’ve only heard very great things about the previous resident as well. They’re just really happy with everything.
“It’s like ‘Yeah, Manchester residents are really good, they know their clinical stuff, they’re great with patients.’ So I think Manchester and their professors definitely prepare all their students pretty well for that.”
And Moghadam herself?
“I think Manchester prepared me very well,” she says. “They did a great workup teaching me the clinical side, as well as the human side of things. You know, putting that emotion, that heart, into taking care of my patients.”
As a PGY-1 community pharmacy resident at El Rio/U of Arizona, Moghadam has been able to put all of that into practice in a variety of ways. Because the residency program is a collaborative effort between El Rio and the University, she found herself not only working with and counseling patients in the clinic and spending time in the pharmacy learning about medication management, she also was involved in a teaching certificate program that enabled her to deliver an occasional lecture back on the Arizona campus.
Which she enjoyed.
“It’s really fun,” she says. “It’s interesting to see the students, and seeing just how they progress from their first day – like not really knowing anything and being very nervous, and now seeing most of them at the end of their first year and seeing how much they’ve progressed and how much they’ve learned.”
That variety of experience, thanks to Manchester, was not really a brave new world for Moghadam. While at MU, she did an externship working with the Native American population at Bemidji, Minn., Area Office of the U.S. Public Health Service, which in turn led to a second stint working with the Chippewa tribe in Cloquet and Duluth, Minn.
What she learned was that Native American populations have a high incidence of endocrine issues such as diabetes – knowledge she’s been able to draw upon at El Rio, where she’s also worked with patients suffering from diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol.
“Anything that has to do with diabetes, I get to manage,” she says.