Interview with MD Medical School of Pharmacy dean

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Aug 3, 2002 by Nancy Kercheval

Dr. David Knapp, dean of the University of Maryland Medical School of Pharmacy, predicts there is going to continue to be a shortfall of pharmacists as the baby boomers age and increase the number of medications they need to cure their ills. The School of Pharmacy increased its enrollment by 20 percent in an effort to help meet the shortage. In this second of a two-part series, Knapp continues his discussion with The Daily Record.

With the anticipated shortage of pharmacists, new schools will be needed to increase the number of graduates. Do you have to protect your faculty members here?

Yes you do. There is a ripple effect, no question about it, into our faculty, particularly our clinical faculty. We get raided. One of our former faculty members is now the dean at the new School of Pharmacy over at Shenandoah [University] in Winchester, Va.

Actually we have had more faculty get hired away by industry than by new schools. Most of the new schools tend to focus very specifically on educating pharmacists for community pharmacy positions. And the kind of faculty that are used to a school like ours is really a more comprehensive school. It's got research and scholarship and outreach programs and so forth. We haven't had too much trouble retaining faculty from inroads from other new schools -- the exception being if somebody is offered a deanship or the opportunity to really move the whole school forward. But where we do lose them is to the pharmaceutical industry because when we get a good, top-notch clinician who spends three or four years with us and becomes a recognized expert in drug information or in clinical care in some specialty like cardiology or intensive care, heck, the drug industry will come and drop a doubled salary on them. We don't have a prayer.

How about the number of students who are applying to pharmacy schools?

It has increased. We had a dip about four or five years ago, sort of at the time of the dot-com stuff where a lot of young people were gravitating to communications, to electronics, to biotech, to all those hot things. But as the shortage really became noticeable and the salaries went up and the opportunities became more apparent, we did a lot more active recruiting in the last three or four years, [and] we've seen our applicant pools creep up.

So we've got about 400 applicants for the 120 places. And I mean real applicants. When I talk about applicants, it's not just somebody who says, 'Hey maybe I'm interested.' These are people that carry things to the application phase and are vetted as meeting the minimum requirements. So we get 120 very good students. We've got a grade point of 3.6 and higher, most of them are in their early to mid-20s, most already have a B.S. degree. They know what they want to do.

Do new schools have difficulties recruiting students?

I can't answer for sure, but I think nationally the applicant pool was about 2.5 to three persons per place in schools generally. The new schools use different tactics. Many of them -- remember we're talking about a dozen nationally -- have been started by osteopathic medical schools. Most osteopathic medical schools are private schools and they look at starting a pharmacy school as sort of extending their product length. They've already got a faculty on board that can teach the basic sciences. So if they can recruit the pharmacy- specific people, then they don't have to recruit as many faculty members. They can often use space that they already have in an osteopathic medical school and may not need to make as big an investment in a building or something like that.

Since your 20 percent increase in enrollment, are there plans to expand the pharmacy school?

There have been plans for 14 years to have a Pharmacy Hall addition built. When we expanded in the mid-'90s, we went from three classes to four of 100 apiece. And we have been scrambling for space ever since.

The building we're in -- Pharmacy Hall -- was opened in 1983 and there were problems at that point. This was supposed to be a nine- story building and then it ended up being a seven-story building. So we never had enough room to bring everybody into this building right from the word go. And then we expanded by a third and now we're expanding again by another 20 percent. And we've got students hanging from the rafters. You wouldn't know it right now --we're in the middle of the summer and they're on rotations. But you might have noticed when you came in all of those seats that are out in the lounge there. We are stretching both lecture halls by taking out an aisle and putting in more seats and putting more seats out front.

Our faculty and students are now spread in six different buildings across this campus -- most of which were not designed for pharmaceutical education. So the Pharmacy Hall addition, which would sit in this parking lot, would enable us to do two things -- both consolidate our people that are all over campus, and give us the wherewithal to expand by installing lecture halls from 175 for one and 250 for another. We're looking to expand our number of faculty just to keep up with 120 students here in the next two or three years.