Gabriella Mignosa and Emma Van Reysen beat out more than 130 teams to win highly competitive event at national conference

Two University of Rhode Island College of Pharmacy students won a national pharmaceutical skills competition at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists’ Midyear Conference in New Orleans this week, after three rounds of competition against more than 130 college of pharmacy teams from across the country.

Gabriella Mignosa and Emma Van Reysen, both P4 students in their final year, emerged as the winners of the highly competitive event in which participants prepare written and oral presentations on a specific patient scenario. Given just two hours to prepare Sunday morning, competitors had to present a comprehensive written treatment plan identifying and addressing all conditions affecting an imaginary patient, before making an oral presentation, and then facing an interrogation from a panel of judges who peppered them with pointed questions about their plan of care on the particularly complicated case.

“You have to answer as many problems as you can in terms of what you would do with this patient,” said Mignosa, a resident of Hamden, CT. “We had to create very detailed plans for every problem, whether it’s primary, secondary or tertiary, so it’s very lifelike. We had to adjust their meds, maybe stop meds or start them on new meds. We also had to identify therapeutic goals and monitoring parameters. So it’s really quite extensive.”

The students were faced with a patient diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a type of cancer that attacks white blood cells, along with a host of complications like neutropenia, a condition in which the body lacks sufficient white blood cells to fight infection. The patient also suffered from chemo-induced vomiting and diarrhea, as well as preexisting conditions including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes.

“We were thinking that’s a lot of problems, and wondered if we were overthinking it, then we later saw the answer key and saw, yeah, the patient had a lot of problems,” said Van Reysen, a Woonsocket native. “Real pharmacists write the cases, so they are very lifelike. It was a really good mix of chronic and acute conditions. It was definitely a very tough case.”

Prior to the national competition, the pair prepared by studying test cases and working with URI pharmacy Professor Maggie Charpentier. They won a local competition at URI by addressing a different patient scenario, then emerged in the top 10 after a semi-final round earlier during the ASHP conference. After the finals, the teams were seated in the first two rows at a reception during which Van Reysen and Mignosa were announced the winners.

“We were absolutely shocked,” Van Reysen said. “There’s a video and you can see our jaws just absolutely dropping. We had no idea, and we found out next to all our friends and our faculty members, so it was a really cool experience.”

“It was definitely an absolute surprise,” Mignosa added. “They put us in the second row, and I thought there was no way they would put the winners in the second row. They threw us off. What made it so enjoyable was having the support from everyone at URI. Having our friends support us, having alumni who are in residencies now come up to us and congratulate us. It wouldn’t have been possible without the support from URI.”

The two students are scheduled to graduate in May, and both plan to pursue residencies, Mignosa in solid organ transplant, and Van Reysen in either cardiology or critical care. Both students credit the college’s emphasis on experiential learning for preparing them not just for the ASHP competition, but for the actual patient care they will encounter throughout their careers.

 

“When you’re on rotations, it’s a different level of learning, because it is very hands-on,” Van Reysen said. “I think that really helped a lot for both of use to be able to tackle this case and handle all the patient encounters we deal with every day.”