Another article for you pharmacy students
Posted on Sun, Jan. 15, 2006
Schools adapt to meet a growing need for pharmacists
By TONI CARDARELLA Special to The Star
A red-hot job market for pharmacy graduates has prompted Kansas City area universities to look at ways to make room for more students in their pharmacy programs.
“From the educational standpoint, we have many more applicants than we can handle,” said Robert Piepho, dean of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Last year, UMKC accepted 113 students out of 456 qualified applicants, he said. That’s about 50 more applicants than the year before. The school’s maximum acceptance was only 75 students about seven years ago.
Nationally, there was a 53.9 percent increase in applications received for the 2003-2004 academic year from the previous year, according to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. The organization also reported that a record 8,158 degrees were awarded in the 2003-2004 school year, an 8.9 percent increase from a year earlier.
Still, the rising enrollment and increasing number of graduates won’t be able to keep pace with the expected demand, which is fueled partly by the country’s aging population. Older people tend to need more medications, and the new Medicare program means an increased workload for pharmacists.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a shortfall of 157,000 pharmacists by 2020.??
UMKC in 2000 embarked on a strategy to better manage pharmacy school enrollment and address the shortage of pharmacists, Piepho said. A new building with larger classrooms was planned and funded, and it’s scheduled to be completed in 2007, allowing for five more students per year over a four-year period.
But the most important piece of the plan, Piepho said, is the satellite program that began this fall at the University of Missouri-Columbia, in partnership with the School of Health Professions there.
In Lawrence, the University of Kansas School of Pharmacy is also working to accommodate more students. The school accepted 105 this academic year from an estimated 500 qualified applicants, compared with 85 accepted five or six years ago, said Gene Hotchkiss, the school’s associate dean.
“We’re in the preliminary stages of considering a new facility in Lawrence,” he said. “We also are considering and looking at the possibility of what most schools in the states around us have done: a satellite campus.”
The satellite campus would be at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita, a location that could fuel recruitment efforts to the south, central and western sections of Kansas, where pharmacist shortages are greater compared with urban areas, he said.
Hotchkiss said the school’s last career day drew about 50 recruiters to talk to about 100 graduates.
“We had to pretty much close people off because we didn’t have enough room,” said Shelly Janasz, manager of student services at UMKC’s pharmacy school.
Janasz said 38 companies attended the fair in November.
Paul Hampton, who will graduate in May from the UMKC School of Pharmacy, said he gets at least two calls a day from recruiters.
“I have been told there are jobs in hospitals, long-term-care pharmacies, mail order, and of course chains,” he said. “I have seen offers from $38 to $48 an hour.”
The demand for new pharmacists has created a bit of a bidding war, with offers of entry-level salaries ranging from $85,000 to $100,000, sign-on bonuses, and other benefits and incentives. One company was offering a three-year lease of a luxury sports car.
Additionally, the demand has created more career choices for graduates, who can work in various settings, from retail, hospitals and nursing homes to opportunities in drug development, research and health policy. That in turn has led to increased interest in the pharmacy career. As many as 10 universities and colleges are expected to open pharmacy schools by 2010, reports the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.
The majority of graduates will choose to practice in retail pharmacies, where most of the country’s pharmacists currently work.
In 2002, pharmacists held about 230,000 jobs, with about 62 percent of those in retail pharmacies, the labor bureau said. About 22 percent worked in hospitals, while others worked in clinics, mail-order pharmacies, pharmaceutical wholesalers, home health care agencies or the federal government.
Tracy Jo McCombs, 37, retired from the military to pursue a pharmacy career. The UMKC student from Kansas City, Kan., hopes to be in a residency training program this summer, but plans to work as a retail pharmacist until the program starts in July. She already has four job offers.
“Completing a residency program allows me to expand my clinical knowledge in an educational hospital environment,” she said.
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public school and for what it cost to go to mercer for 4 years you could go to UGA for 12-15 years of school 
