Shortage of pharmacists persists despite high pay
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Despite high starting salaries, unmet demand for pharmacists persists nationwide
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July 13, 2000
Web posted at: 9:07 p.m. EDT (0107 GMT)
From Charles Zewe
CNN Correspondent
DALLAS (CNN) -- At Children's Hospital in Dallas, Zippi the pharmacist dispenses a vial of aspirin here, an antibiotic there, rather stiffly taking the bar-coded medicine from hooks and plopping it into trays on rails for delivery to patients.
If Zippi were a newly graduated pharmacist, he might be making close to $74,000 a year. Instead, Zippi is making $0 -- which is, more or less, the going rate for robots.
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 CNN's Charles Zewe looks at the problems caused by the pharmacist shortage |
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The automated drug dispenser represents one hospital's radical response to the problem of a soaring demand for drugs -- prescriptions were up by half a billion over the last eight years -- coupled with a nationwide shortage of druggists that persists in spite of high starting salaries.
Nearly half the hospital's human pharmacists leave every year for high-paying jobs elsewhere.
Zippi, who is not as easily tempted, "handles about 70 per cent of the inpatient doses," said the hospital's John Tourville. "That freed up a lot of people to let them do more professional activities" -- such as consulting with physicians or teaching parents how to help treat their asthmatic kids.
Not enough new graduates
The nation's 81 pharmacy schools, where doctoral programs have been stretched from five years to six, turn out about 8,000 druggists a year -- roughly equal to job openings at a single national chain.
"There's a lot of other settings beyond the traditional community pharmacy practice or hospital practice where pharmacists are finding that their talents are utilized," said Lucinda Maine of the American Pharmaceutical Association.
Independent pharmacist Brian Smith said it took him five months to find an associate.
"If you couldn't a find job the day you started looking, there would be something wrong with your abilities, I would think," Smith said.
Smith says he was competing for personnel with chains, managed care companies and even dot.com drugstores employing hundreds of pharmacists.
Longer workdays
The shortage of druggists means longer hours, increasing pressure and potential errors. Experts estimate mistakes are made on up to 5 per cent of the nation's 3 billion prescriptions a year.
"Pharmacists feel highly stressed in the environments where they're working today," said Maine.
A Virginia druggist, who once was quoted as saying his "mind was fried" from filling hundreds of prescriptions a day, is facing the possible loss of his license after allegedly failing to catch a technician's mistake and dispensing an anti-depressant to a boy at five times the prescribed strength.
The child's mother gave her son two teaspoons of the syrup before he went to bed. He never woke up.
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Pharmacy Schools in the United States Index by State
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