Meet Dawn Whitehill, pharmacy director at the Downtown campus

I first moved to Iowa City to get my pharmacy degree from the University of Iowa. I grew up in a small farm town in Northwest Iowa, so Iowa City felt like the big city to me! After getting my PharmD, I did a specialty residency in Waterloo with a focus on primary care and family practice. Then I moved to South Dakota and taught at South Dakota State University as a clinical faculty member and had an ambulatory care practice out of the Veterans Health Administration (VA) in Sioux Falls.

After about six years, a mentor of mine from the College of Pharmacy reached out and asked if I might be interested in a pharmaceutical care specialist role at what was then called Mercy Iowa City. My husband and I figured there was no better time to move back to Iowa while our kids were still pretty young. I was grateful to that mentor because the role was quite different than what I was doing in South Dakota. But it ended up being a good fit and now I’ve been here for 17 years.

Over the years, my role has shifted and grown quite a bit, and eventually I became the assistant director and handled many of the management aspects of our department. In 2019, when the pharmacy director retired, I was asked to take his role. It’s definitely not what I set out to do as my career plan–I really thought I’d stay in academia–but sometimes the twists and turns get you where you’re actually meant to be!

When most people think of a pharmacy, they think of a store or space where they pick up their prescriptions. Our pharmacy at the downtown campus doesn’t directly process scripts for pickup. Our services are only for those medications being used within the hospital and administered to the patient by the health care team.

Through Epic, our electronic health record system, we receive orders from providers for specific medications. We process them, check for appropriate dosing, incompatibility, and other aspects of medication safety, and, in some cases, use our sterile compounding facilities to prepare them.

Switching to Epic after the transition last year really was a game-changer as we think about coordinating care across our system. Now we have a lot more visibility into the complete view of a patient’s care and prescription records, so it’s safer for patients. For example, it’s important for us to know if a patient got a dose of pain medication in the emergency department, so we can give appropriate doses as they move to an inpatient floor.

From my perspective, most of us were ready for the stability that UI Health Care could provide. We all wanted to see this hospital continue to serve the Iowa City community and we knew becoming part of UI Health Care would allow that to happen. The integration was led with compassion. UI Health Care leaders took care to minimize the impacts on those of us going through it and focused on preserving the essence of what made Mercy special, which is our mindset and delivery of care.

I'm very proud of the pharmacy staff at the downtown campus and the way they worked through the transition. They're very dedicated and resilient and showed a lot of grit and determination in the years leading up to it.

In addition to the stability I mentioned, it’s the ability to really look into the future and begin planning for it after years of uncertainty. UI Health Care leaders are taking a very thoughtful, deliberate approach to planning for what it means to be a health care system with three campuses (university campus, downtown campus, and North Liberty)–and it is exciting to see momentum.

From a patient care perspective, it’s been great to partner with the pharmacy at the university campus on things like discharge prescriptions for patients and general operational strategies overall. It really feels like we are all one pharmacy department, we just have different locations.