Pharmacy student Noah Heyne works in the mock pharmacy at Butler University where prospective pharmacy students learn to deal with a crush of demands. (IBJ photo/Eric Learned)
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The biggest problems: understaffing and increased responsibilities, which have caused “extreme burnout” and worries about patient safety.
For all their responsibilities, pharmacy technicians have much less education and training and are paid a fraction of what pharmacists make.
Pharmacy technicians, who are only required to have a high school diploma or equivalent, make an average of $36,740, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Pharmacists, on the other hand, spend four to six years in college and graduate school, usually earning a doctor of pharmacy degree (or PharmD, for short), and make an average of $128,570.
Yet drug stores and hospitals say they could not function without pharmacy technicians, who do a wide range of jobs, from managing inventory to filling pill bottles.
In hospitals, pharmacy technicians also prepare intravenous medications to patients under a pharmacist’s supervision and deliver medications to nurses’ stations or automated dispensing machines.
At Methodist and University hospitals downtown, administrators are trying to fill dozens of pharmacy technician jobs. The two hospitals, owned by Indiana University Health, are running a vacancy rate of roughly 20% to 25% for a staff of about 100 pharmacy technicians who help with acute-care, in-patient side, said Tate Trujillo, pharmacy director for the two hospitals.
That sometimes means that pharmacists, who are already stretched thin, have to pick up the slack and do the work of the pharmacy techs, such as delivering the medications, stocking inventory and preparing IV meds for patients.
“I think it’s important to recognize the breadth and depth of what pharmacy technicians do on a regular basis,” Trujillo said.
At the two IU Health downtown hospitals, pharmacists earn between $50 and $85 an hour, while pharmacy techs earn less than half that amount, between $18.50 and $27 an hour.
Eskenazi Health has nearly 200 pharmacy staffers who prepare medications for hospital patients and fill prescriptions for outpatients.
“We suffer from the pharmacist and pharmacy technician shortage just like everyone else,” said Katasha Butler, an Eskenazi pharmacist who holds the title of medication use and regulatory compliance coordinator. “It seems like we’re constantly recruiting and trying to get new employees to fill the holes that we have.”
At Community Health Network, administrators say they are sufficiently staffed across many of their pharmacies. A big exception: finding pharmacists who are specialists in certain areas, such as infectious disease, oncology and cardiology. Positions that used to be filled within weeks are now taking longer.
“We’ve had positions posted for months,” said Dawn Moore, Community Health’s vice president and chief pharmacy officer, and immediate past president of the Indiana Pharmacy Association. “…We’ve had some [positions] posted around the first quarter of the year that we haven’t been able to fill yet.”
For hospitals, a shortage of pharmacists in the community can lead to unfortunate consequences. If patients cannot get their medications filled fully and promptly after being discharged, they could become sick and need to return to the hospital for more attention.
That hurts not just the patient, but the hospital which might have a shortage of beds and could be penalized by Medicare for a high number of patient readmissions.
“It impacts all of pharmacy and all of health care as an ecosystem,” Moore said.
Rough staffing outlook
As hospitals and drug stores are scrambling to staff their pharmacies, the labor outlook remains challenging.
Enrollment in the nation’s 141 pharmacy schools in the fall of 2020 was 5.1% lower than the year before, according to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.
The largest pharmacy school in Indiana, at Purdue University, said it saw a 6% decline in applications last year. Purdue College of Pharmacy, with 600 students, said it was able to fill its 150 first-year slots, because it still gets about three applications for every opening.
“One of the great challenges that many programs are facing is pharmacy is a very rigorous doctoral-level program,” said Eric Barker, dean of Purdue’s College of Pharmacy. “And we need to ensure that we’re admitting students that meet that quality.”
He added: “We’ve been able to maintain that quality here at Purdue quite well. But I believe many programs are beginning to admit students that perhaps a decade ago, they might not have admitted, just trying to meet enrollment targets.”
He said some pharmacy schools have reported missing their enrollment targets by up to 25%.
Butler University has seen its pharmacy enrollment fluctuate in recent years, with classes swelling to as high as 130 students per class in some years, but settling down to 80 to 100 students recently, Vernon said.
“We’ve seen a decline…and I think that’s unfortunately common across all schools,” she said.
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