Why Residency Training Matters to Geisinger Pharmacy
More than 75% of Geisinger’s 2026 pharmacy residency graduates stayed with the organization—as employees or as second-year residents. That number tells a story about training, mentorship, and the kind of professional community residents experience here.
More than 75% of Geisinger’s 2026 pharmacy residency graduates stayed with the organization—as employees or as second-year residents. That number tells a story about training, mentorship, and the kind of professional community residents experience here.
Daniel S Longyhore
Residency training serves a practical purpose in Geisinger Pharmacy. It gives new pharmacists focused time, coaching, and clinical exposure before they move into roles that often require more than entry-level preparation. Some residents use that year to strengthen general practice skills. Others use it to move toward specialty practice. In both cases, residency creates space for pharmacists to grow with direction, feedback, and support.
The programs also strengthen the people doing the teaching. Precepting residents keeps pharmacists engaged in education, scholarship, professional service, and mentorship. It creates relationships that often continue long after the residency year ends, whether the resident remains at Geisinger or takes that experience into another health system.
Training Pharmacists for the Work Ahead
A Doctor of Pharmacy degree prepares graduates to enter practice, but certain roles require additional depth. Residency gives pharmacists supervised experience in patient care, practice management, teaching, project work, and leadership. PGY1 programs help residents broaden and refine their general practice skills. PGY2 programs allow them to build expertise in a defined specialty area.
That additional training is especially important in health-system pharmacy, where pharmacists are practicing in areas such as emergency medicine, critical care, oncology, infectious diseases, ambulatory care, specialty pharmacy, and administration. These are roles where clinical judgment, communication, and comfort with complexity develop through experience.
A Systemwide Residency Portfolio
Geisinger offers ASHP-accredited PGY1 pharmacy residency programs at Geisinger Lewistown Hospital, Geisinger Community Medical Center, Geisinger Medical Center, and Geisinger Wyoming Valley. Additional PGY1 training is available through Geisinger Clinic programs and Geisinger Specialty Pharmacy.
The system also offers PGY2 programs in emergency medicine, infectious diseases, critical care, and oncology. For pharmacists interested in leadership, Geisinger supports a 24-month health-system pharmacy administration and leadership residency and a corporate pharmacy administration and leadership residency offered in conjunction with Cencora.
What Retention Shows
For the twenty-three residents in the class of 2026, Geisinger retained more than 75% of graduates in either full-time pharmacist positions or second-year residency training within the system. Several residents remained in Geisinger specialty programs or moved into employment after graduation. Others left for understandable reasons, including specialty training opportunities outside of Geisinger or positions closer to family and support systems.
Those departures still matter. When residents train at Geisinger and then practice elsewhere, they take part of the program’s influence with them. But when residents choose to stay, it says something about the environment they experienced during training. They saw a place where they could keep learning, find mentors, and imagine the next step in their career.
Preceptors Set the Tone
One reason residents stay is the quality of the people around them. Program directors and preceptors are not only teaching clinical content. They are showing residents how to be educators, scholars, mentors, and leaders. Residents see pharmacists who present at meetings, contribute to projects, serve in professional organizations, and support one another across programs.
A recent example is Angela Slampak-Cindric, program director for Geisinger’s PGY2 critical care residency, who received the Louis P. Jeffrey Award from the Eastern States Residency Conference. The award recognizes exemplary residency preceptorship and contributions to the advancement of residency training. Recognition like this is not just an individual accomplishment; it reflects the kind of preceptor leadership residents see during their training year.
One System, Distinct Programs
Geisinger’s residency programs are individually accredited and distinct, but they do not operate in isolation. The programs function under a common system umbrella, with shared policies, procedures, and expectations where appropriate. Program directors meet at least monthly to discuss what is working, what needs attention, and how changes in residency education or accreditation may affect their programs.
That collaboration shows up in practical ways. Program directors build resources together, revise existing tools, share learning experiences, precept for one another when possible, and serve as subject matter experts for residents outside their own programs. The result is a larger education network rather than a collection of separate sites.
That network matters to residents. It gives them access to more perspectives, more examples of practice, and a broader professional community. It also helps them see Geisinger as a connected pharmacy enterprise rather than a single rotation site or one-year stop.
The Value of Staying Connected
Resident retention is not the only measure of a residency program, but it is an important one. It reflects whether residents find meaningful work, strong mentorship, and a professional community they want to remain part of. For Geisinger, retaining residents also supports continuity in clinical practice, strengthens the pharmacist workforce, and keeps institutional knowledge within the system.
The goal is not to keep every resident. Some will leave for the right opportunity, and that is part of the broader value of training. A strong residency program should prepare pharmacists well enough to succeed anywhere, while creating an experience meaningful enough that many choose to stay.
For Geisinger Pharmacy, that is the work behind the retention number: build programs that develop skill, create connection, and show residents a future they can recognize as their own.
