Hospitals and chain stores compete for pharmacists
by Barry Henderson
The last crop of graduates from the University of Tennessee College of Pharmacy didn't go out looking for a job. The jobs came looking for them.
Glen Farr, associate dean of the college, says large pharmacy chains such as Walgreens, CVS and Wal-Mart are so desperate for new pharmacists their recruiters hang out around pharmacy schools, offering the sort of huge salaries and other incentives that are becoming nearly legendary across the country. We're talking $70,000 to $90,000 annual salaries, plus signing bonuses and other special benefits, such as guaranteed time off.
Farr's office is in Knoxville, where he oversees the clinical program in this part of the state of fourth-year candidates for the doctor of pharmacy degree that awaits their graduation from UT's Memphis medical school.
"The chains are hiring away from the hospitals, too," Farr says.
The competition is fierce be-cause of the growth in prescriptions, with each drugstore company wanting an ever-larger share of a market that is ballooning.
"The number of prescriptions written and filled this year will be about three billion. That number has doubled in the last five years and will double again in the next five," Farr says.
That means hospitals and chains are in a bidding war for both the new grads and pharmacists on their own staffs, which are being raided willfully by competitors.
Nationally, the number of pharmacy graduates fell steadily from 1995 to 2000, when it began to turn upward again. About 200,000 pharmacists are licensed nationwide, and 6,000 of those licenses are in Tennessee, but Farr says only about 3,500 of those state licenses are being used in pharmacy practice here.
The growth in prescriptions helped bring at least a temporary flight from the stresses and strains of pharmacy practice. With compensation packages spiraling upward, that trend is apparently reversing. There are 125 students in the first-year class at UT's pharmacy college, compared with 100 in the second-year class.
"There used to be 81 pharmacy schools. Now there are 91. There are five opening this year," Farr says. He agrees with the national consensus that the number of pharmacists could double in five years and still "be barely able to keep up" with the expected growth in prescriptions. "We'll have to use technology better," he says, referring to robotics and auto-fill machines that are already on line or being tested to speed up the filling of prescriptions. A pharmacist has to check each scrip no matter how they may be filled, he says.
Farr has spent 27 years in pharmacy education. He's seen the gender trend among pharmacy students move from less than 20 percent women to 70 percent in the UT college today.
"It takes away from nursing, too," Farr says of the gender shift, which has not been matched with a comparable shift from women to men in the nursing profession. A teacher of basic pharmacology to UT nursing students, Farr is conscious of the shortage of nurses and the tugs of all the health-care professions on each other. Specialty surveys show that a nurse-practitioner with a master's degree can hope to match the salary level of a pharmacist with a doctorate. But a registered nurse with a bachelor's, a master's or a doctorate is hard-pressed to find employment at those $70,000-plus annual levels.
Hospitals, all of which employ pharmacists on 24/7 schedules, have based a part of their recruitment and retention plan on the different, sometimes more interesting practice of pharmacy in the hospital setting. Richard Hammett, assistant administrator at Baptist Hospital in Knoxville, says the hospital jobs are more demanding but more varied and, in Baptist's case, more decentralized. He says pharmacists who adapt to that model are happier in hospitals than in drug stores.
Hammett and officials of Knoxville's three other big hospitals have a third recruitment challenge with proportions similar to those for securing nurses and pharmacists: Trained technicians specializing in the imaging technologies are in high demand because of more—and more sophisticated—equipment and increases in the number of procedures ordered by physicians. Knoxville hospitals have been offering scholarships or tuition reimbursement to students in radiological, ultra-sound, CT scanning and MRI fields, to secure commitments from the students to work for them.
At the hospital level, there are no surpluses of "allied health" personnel, and recruitment crises may shift from one professional specialty to another. But the Baby Boomer generation and its continuing consumption of medical services practically guarantees that the demand for pharmacists, nurses and technologists will exceed the supply in the Knoxville marketplace for years to come.
August 8, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 32
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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