So, I hear there is a severe shortage of pharmacists, and that it will continue to be a growing field. With the economy and employment the way they are, maybe we should all get ourselves off to pharmacy school?
Any pharmacist Dopers? What does it involve, how does one qualify, what’s the work like and the pay?
And can you take some drugs home with you?
Well, I suppose “The Straight Dope” would make an interesting name for a pharmaceutical franchise…
Well, IANAP, but I can tell you that right off the bat it’s going to require six years of education and a doctor of pharmacy degree to get a license now. They abolished the five-year bachelor of pharmacy last year.
Still want to do it?
I (briefly) wrote a publication on pharmacies and privacy law, and the story I kept hearing was that at least part of the reason there’s such a “severe shortage” of pharmacists is that the profession’s been getting less and less attractive. So yes, there’s a shortage - at the current wages and working conditions. From what I was hearing, production quotas keep getting higher, hours keep getting longer, and pay just hasn’t been keeping up. In fact, some folks I spoke with felt that the U.S. health care system was doing its damnedest to turn pharmacists into little more than pill counters, which in the past was a most unfair slur.
There was also a recent article in the Buffalo News (it’s archived now, and I can’t link to it) which intimated that many local HMO’s require pharamacists to fill out mind-boggling amounts of paperwork, a requirement which is now taking up the bulk of the pharamacists’ time. I suspect that the same is true in many other localities.
They can call me “pill counters” all they want, as long as I can bring me home a gram or two of pharmaceutical cocaine every night.
– Ukulele “Take a Whiff on Me” Ike
From the U.S. government’s Occupational Outlook Handbook:
You could do worse. Starting salaries are decent, but it looks like 30 years of experience doesn’t get you that much further along. Probably steadier employment than a lot of other things. No thanks, though.
I think you ultimately might have to account for stuff, Uke, but it’d be glorious for a little while.
The only problem with being a pharmacist is that you have to deal with people. 
I’ve worked in pharmacy for 12 years now. I started in retail, then moved to long-term care pharmacy, then hospital, and now I’m working in a small independant pharmacy. I’m just a technician, but I’ve done just about everything there is to do in a pharmacy.
In most states, you have to go to college for 2 years, then pharmacy school for 3 or 4 years. (I know in South Carolina, you are required to get your Pharm. D., so it’s 4 years there.) The only difficult thing I remember pharmacy students complaining about was organic chemistry. No one liked that class, and a lot of them failed it on the first try.
Then you get to find a job. Retail is the easiest to get a job in, but the pay and the hours blow goats. Working 50 hours a week, and only getting salary sucks. Not to mention the paperwork, regulations, and the fact that you often have to deal with people whose only concern is making profits, and not your emotional well-being. Hospital is a little more difficult to get a job, although the pay is good. But you’re on call a lot, so be prepared to make some trips to work at ungodly hours. (I know this was a sort of a rhetorical question, but you asked!)
It can be a good job, if you get a job in the right place, and are really happy doing it. But I’ll tell you right now, one of the things we tried to beat into our pharmacy students’ heads was to stay as far from a retail job. It’s not worth the heartache.
From that same site:
Sounds too confusing, making head hurt.
You have to go for 2 years of pre-pharmacy school, take an admissions test, serve as an intern, enroll and get a masters or PhD, and THEN pass a test.
So… What 2 years of Pre-pharmacy, plus the 5 years for the Masters, 6-7 for the PhD? Whattzat? 9 years of school? That would make me 35 when I graduate… eck- think I will stick with my masters in Physical Therapy. LOL. Thats only 5 years.
Nope.
You take 2 years of pre-pharmacy. Basic college stuff, math, English, whatnot, combined with a lot of sciences.
Then, you go to pharmacy school. Some are easy to get into, some are difficult. You go there for 5 years, to get your Pharm. D. (at least in SC).
Your rotations are included in the course of study, much like student-teaching is included for most education majors. The only school that I’m pretty sure about is the Medical University of South Carolina. (All of our students came from there, and I worked there for about 2 years.) They do rotations during the first year of pharmacy school. (I guess so that you can make sure it’s what you really want to do.) The boards are pretty difficult. And in SC, if you fail the boards, you have a year to re-take them, and IIRC if you fail a second time, you have to take a refresher course. (It makes sense, but it’s expensive as heck.)
I’d rather be slothful.
One of my friends wanted to be a pharmacist. He signed on to have the Navy pay for it (and oh, was he smug, oh yes he was). He’s not even through pharmacy school and still has a six year run as an officer to look forward to. Last I heard, it was miserably hard work for him.
To become a pharmacist in Florida, you must go through two years of pre-pharmacy (basic sciences and a lot of chemistry), then go through 4 years of pharmacy school (of which one year is rotations, basically on the job training at different sites with a lot of research), then you have to pass the NAPLEX, which is the national pharmacy licensing exam and basically measures your competence in pharmacology and basic pharmacy practice, as well as passing the MPJE (the multi-state pharmacy jurispurdence exam, or pharmacy law). Pre-pharmacy is no breeze, as it contains advanced math and physics as well as organic and bio-chemistry. Pharmacy school is made up of: 1st year - A&P, pathophysiology, microbiology, pharmaceutical calculations, biostatistics, and a few other courses such as medical terminology. 2nd year - this is the toughie, the “weeding out” year as we like to call it. This year contains 2 semesters each of pharmacology (you are taught disease states and then the medications and classes of medications used to treat them, side effects, interactions, etc., etc.) medicinal chemistry (pretty advanced stuff - we were using Silicon Graphics computers to map out specific drug compounds and metabolites), pharmaceutics (which was basically how to make certain kinds of drugs, what the differences where between them e.g. ointments and creams, solutions and suspensions etc., and also isotonicity). That year also has courses in kinetics, which involve how a drug moves around and is metabolized in the body, as well as various other courses in pharmacy administration and management. The 3rd year of pharmacy is basically clinical in nature. Most of our courses dealt with therapeutics, which is going through disease states (CHF, asthma, cystic fibrosis, etc.) and then analyzing the drugs that deal with those disease states. There is also a course that deals with compounding medicines called prescription analysis, as well as the first course you get dealing with pharmacy law. Rotations (the last year of school) are spent at different hospitals and institiutions working under different doctors and pharmacists, and doing research. I had to present a publishable paper at the ASHP meeting in 2000 in order for me to graduate that year. Pharmacy school is inevitably intertwined with med school, and most of my rotations were spent with med students in my last year.
Now, lets flash forward 3 years after graduation. I work for a large, large corporation that has pharmacies on almost every corner. The pay is great, I have to admit (almost double what I expected when I first entered school), and they treat you pretty well. The reason I, as a young pharmacist, do not want to be in this environment anymore, as are many pharmacists who are either exiting the RETAIL field or choosing other things thus creating the pharmacist shortage are: 1) Feeling unprofessional. How can you ask someone who is an expert in their field to ring up dogfood, deal with customers, and submit to the will of a store manager who may not even have a high school diploma, without hurting their feelings? Being a retail pharmacist may pay a lot of money, but at some point, it just ain’t worth it. 2) Dealing with insurance companies. This is a nightmare. It is such a nightmare that most high volume pharmacies just designate a technician that only handles problems with people’s coverage. A lot of pharmacists just say, “I didn’t go to school to deal with this”, and exit 3) It is a very stressfull job, thank you very much. You are under a lot of pressure to make sure you verify every prescription with 100% accuracy, and at the same time do it fast, fast, FAST!!! If you don’t, you will be hearing from your boss. After a while, it can grind on you, and you move on to something else. So to answer your original question you can become a pharmacist but it ain’t fun.
Kspharm,
PharmD.And no, you absolutely cannot take any drugs home with you:)
When I was scheduling my surgery the nurse told me that they were having a hard time getting people in because there is a national shortage of anasteseologist.
Well, that’s reassuring!
I wanna get the guy who hasn’t had a day off in months and is having a bad day and be his last patient!
Come to think of it they did say they were having a hard time waking me in recovery.
Damn—math? chemistry? I didn’t know you had to be smart. Well, that lets out Baby.
A story on the news over the weekend about robotic pill dispensers – sort of like an automated tape library kind of unit, with a wall full of large containers, and a robotic arm which locates the desired medication, counts out the appropriate number of tablets, and applies a label to the bottle.
The idea is to take the drudgework of “pill counting” out of the business and let the pharmacists actually do the important work of checking for drug interactions, advising the customers, etc.
I saw that same story, BrotherCadfael, and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. They kept reassuring us that the robots made fewer errors than people, but I have seen too many machines go haywire. What if they accidentally set it one jiggle too far to the right or something?
Actually, if the machines are properly set up and maintained, I believe it would in fact reduce the number of errors – as long as the correct info was typed into it. Now if we could only do something about the doctor’s handwriting…
Seriously, what about the doctor’s handwriting? Has there ever been a case where the script was written so badly that the pharmacist misread it, with injury resulting? If so, how would the malpractice be apportioned? With the doctor, for writing so poorly, or with the pharmacist, for not calling and checking?
Aren’t there any pharmacist diplomacy mills? You know, the kind where you lie on a beach in the Caribbean for a couple of years and then get handed a diploma? Sure they lack the prestige of Yale or Harvard, but with the pharmacist shortage I figure there’s a job for everyone.
Of course, maybe there aren’t any such schools. In which case I see an even better opportunity than becoming a pharmacist. I’m going to become a college president.
So, it is with a great sense of honor, that I announce the opening of the Little Nemo University of Pharmacology and other Drug-Related Sciences. Tell 'em Eve sent you and get a 10% off coupon at the Tiki Bar.