Dear Colleague,
My last Executive Update was Part 1 of Five Trends That Are Disrupting Pharmacy Practice, a presentation I made to a few thousand pharmacists last year. This week is Part 2 of this four-part series. Keep in mind that in these presentations I tried not to focus on NCPA's advocacy priorities. But even though these presentations were intended to focus on non-political topics, it became clear that politics are woven into everything in pharmacy—whether we like it or not.
As a reminder, Trend No.1 was vertical integration of primary care. Next up is:
Trend No. 2—"Workforce needs put pressure on pharmacy practice acts." This trend is about "tech" squared—pharmacy technicians and technology. When I presented this trend last year, there was chaos in many of the mega-chain drugstores. Publicly traded chain drugstores were closing—sometimes with no or little notice—leaving patients to figure out for themselves how to access their prescription medications and independent pharmacy teams scrambling to try to help these abandoned patients.
Fast forward almost a year, and the chaos has lessened as COVID-19 vaccine demand has cooled. But workforce shortages are still apparent. NCPA's latest survey of pharmacy owners found that two-thirds were experiencing workforce shortages and 80 percent of those were for pharmacy technicians (19 percent were having trouble finding pharmacists). Also, this week Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens announced they were cutting their pharmacy hours due to staffing shortages. A Forbes headline read: "A Pharmacist Shortage Has Caused CVS, Walgreens and Walmart to Cut Pharmacy Hours—Here's What We Know." However, headlines can be misleading. While there may be some geographic areas where it's harder to recruit a pharmacist than other places, the reality is that there are available pharmacists, but they just don't want to subject themselves to the working environment of the mega-chains.
One could say: "sounds like a personal problem." But it has far-reaching consequences for the whole profession. Winston Churchill famously said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." The point in my 5 Trends presentation was to show that pharmacy practice act solutions to the chaos may actually be corporate Trojan horses aimed at replacing pharmacist jobs with technology and technicians.
To be very clear, community pharmacists want to use technology wisely, and they appreciate the assistance of skilled pharmacy technicians. There may be a need to change some pharmacy practice acts to allow those things to happen, but changes should not be motivated by long-simmering chain workload issues boiling over. Replacing humans with technology may work fine on a health care assembly line but it breaks down when patients have individualized health care needs that aren't best served with a one-size-fits-all approach.
Keeping an eye on proposed pharmacy practice act changes to technology and technicians to vet whether the change truly has the profession and the patients we serve in mind or if it is driven by squeezing out more corporate profits is my Trend No.2 of Five Trends That Are Disrupting Pharmacy Practice.
Best,
B. Douglas Hoey, Pharmacist, MBA
NCPA CEO
