Higher pay, expanding options drive pharmacy school boom

Drug Store News, June 9, 2003 by Barbara White-Sax, James Frederick

Time pressures in a retail environment have an impact on how much time pharmacists spend counseling patients and can be a challenge for new graduates. While at pharmacy school, the focus is on disease state counseling and communicating with patients, when pharmacists are faced with a shortage of help and an increasing number of prescriptions to fill, they may not get enough opportunities to spend patients. "Students can default to the demands of the work environment rather than standing firm on what they should be doing when it comes to counseling," said Dean.

Hand-held automation

One of the ways Dean believes students can prepare to meet the challenges of the market is to develop critical thinking skills. "The ability to be open and willing to learn complex technology also is important," he said. This is one area Dean believes pharmacists as a group hold an edge over other health care workers.

Pharmacists, he said, have been on the front lines of accepting technology for years. "Originally, it was the best way to deal with claims, so we began using computers for that reason, and we quickly adopted new applications so that as a profession, we have a fairly robust environment for technology," he said.

At Samford, that means all 460 pharmacy students and 40 faculty members are equipped with a Palm M515. "The field is so vast, it's impossible to memorize everything, so you need to know how to access systems and use technology. A PDA [has] become very important to how we practice."

Another area pharmacy school tries to prepare students for is the importance of understanding reimbursement issues. "We offer core courses in fiscal management and electives in managed care, so students aren't ignorant in these matters," said Dean. "Still, I don't believe they understand how much it will affect them."

Retail settings offer creative opportunities

Despite those challenges, Dean believes there's never been a more exciting time to practice pharmacy. "The choices that they have to live out their life's dream as a pharmacist are so varied. Many students come to pharmacy school with a clear picture of what they want to do based on limited experience. Pharmacy is just a corner of the health care world, and everything that happens around it has an impact on that corner," he said.

"There are so many opportunities for health care in the future, and those opportunities will be claimed by those who are not only well educated and well prepared, but who are assertive, entrepreneurial and who are risk takers," he said. "Pharmacists will have to find new ways to meet the changes of the health care marketplace."

In the long run, McCarthy believes that highly trained students will be the driving force behind bottom-up changes in many retail environments. "As students learn more about good counseling and disease state management, they will increase their demands on employers to allow them to use their knowledge and skills to practice pharmacy the way they were trained to practice," he said.