Failing Grade

    Last week I found myself in a situation I had never been in before. I had supervised interns for three years now. All of them were hard working students that I felt would go out and become good pharmacists in whatever type of practice they chose. All of them had passed my rotation.
   Now I was faced with a student that was a bit more challenging. He had come to work every day. He worked while he was with me. He did all his assignments and meticulously researched those things that I asked him to research. At the beginning of the third and final week of the rotation I had to start thinking about his grade.
   Normally this isn't something I have to think about. All of my interns have easily passed my rotation. This time was different. I wasn't sure what to do. My gut told me that I could not in good conscience give a passing grade. My head was telling me that doing this would be unfair.
   Part of the problem was a lack of experience. All of the interns I have had have been familiar with the work flow in a retail pharmacy and are at least a bit familiar with the more commonly used classes of drugs. This intern had come in without this knowledge. This meant that I had to do a bit of remedial work first. He caught on quickly. The problem was that because we had to do the remedial work, he wasn't able to get as much practice with patient communication as would normally happen.
   Another thing that was bothering me was that,to me at least, he lacked enthusiasm. Most people who know me and most of the interns who work with me realise that I am passionate when it comes to my profession. I feel strongly that anyone who goes into any kind of health care profession from physician to nurse aid should be at least partly motivated by a desire to help people. Call it empathy,bedside manner whatever if you aren't interested in making people feel better and become healthier then you need to find something else to do.
   Not everyone feels this way. Certainly some health care professionals I know have gone into it for the money, for the availability of jobs, for the prestige or because of family expectations. Was it fair to let my attitude about what a health care professional should be influence me?
   Maybe he just didn't like retail and was interested in learning only as much as he had to because his career plans were elsewhere. I could understand that too. Retail is not for everyone. If he just wanted to get through his rotation so he could get to the stuff he really wanted to do, I couldn't blame him. I felt the same way when I was in pharmacy school.
    I had to laugh at myself. I always thought that the easiest part of a teacher's job was grading. Most students at one point in time have thought a teacher unfair for giving a lower grade than expected. I was now finding out that it isn't always so easy and what looks like unfairness could have been a carefully thought out process.
   None of this was helping me to decide what to do. It sat in the back of my mind for several days. I'm sure C and most of the people around me were getting tired of listening to me struggle with this challenge.
   I finally decided I needed to seek help. I called the office that oversees the internship program. I was directed to a person that deals with the kind of issues that I was facing. She was very helpful. I told her about my struggle with his grading,that I didn't think a passing score was appropriate, but that I wanted to make sure that he got the extra help I felt he needed to improve his skills. She agreed with me. She reminded me that the skills the students learned in my rotation would be the base for other skills they would learn at other sites. If I didn't feel that he had the basic skills down then I could not pass him. I would not be doing him or his future colleagues any favours by passing him anyway. My case was not new. They had a procedure in place to identify students that need more help and to get them that help. She told me what I needed to do. I felt much better. My struggle was over and I now had a plan.
   I gave the student the appropriate grade and along with the grade sent my assessment of his needs. I felt much better about it. He clearly needed some extra help that I was not prepared or able to give. Now he would get it. Much better.