Saturation crisis solution?

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Disclaimer: I'm not an expert and this is more of a question than than an answer.

What would happen if for one year all pharmacy schools were not allowed to admit any new students? I dont know if that's been thought of or if it's even feasible but when I was in the military if certain career fields were over manned then the number trained for those jobs decreased vice versa. Just my uneducated thought.
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try a whole decade
 
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premedvet said:
Lolz
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It will take around 30 years for the market to equilibrate if schools stopped accepting students today indefinitely. This is because for the next 4 years there will be 15,000 new grads (current P1-P4s) entering the market each year to 1,500 new jobs/year and dropping (90% unemployment rate per year). Then you add on all the recent grads and residency-trained grads who haven’t found a job for the last 5 years and add in all the current underemployed pharmacists (floaters, part times, per diems at retail chains and hospitals who are fighting for more hours/full time positions) and it’s easy to see that without even graduating more students there is plenty of demand for jobs/hours from the current existing pool of licensed pharmacists. The bottom line is that this profession is already at a point of no return and honestly at this rate in about 3-5 years’ time I can see your average joe pharmacist grad doing MTM consults for about $15-20/hr which is going to be the going rate for pharmacists.
 
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premedvet said:
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert and this is more of a question than than an answer.

What would happen if for one year all pharmacy schools were not allowed to admit any new students? I dont know if that's been thought of or if it's even feasible but when I was in the military if certain career fields were over manned then the number trained for those jobs decreased vice versa. Just my uneducated thought.
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It took at least 20 years to get to this point...due to a shortage..Now with no shortage..who knows? In addition the whole Pharmacy system is changing..and it ain't gonna be good...
 
Let's also not forget all the senior citizens that were expected to retire but aren't for various reasons
 
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It cannot be solved.
However, one can make sure that it is not his/her own problem.
 
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TerryTerry said:
It cannot be solved.
However, one can make sure that it is not his/her own problem.
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By doing that, they can also help avoid contributing to saturation, abuse by employers, and the student debt crisis.

Every student that takes out $200k+ in loans to go into the profession helps keep the doors of subpar pharmacy schools open.

Every desperate new grad with $200k+ in loans who accepts lower pay and terrible work conditions only makes the situation worse by enabling employers to treat us as such. If you’re not willing to cut corners, endanger patient safety, and forego bathroom and meal breaks there is a line of desperate new grads who will do so for lower pay.
 
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Pharmcats71 said:
How many senior citizen pharmacists do you know? There aren't many these days.
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I am guilty of this. I hired a 70 year old pharmacist for part time lol hes a great pharmacist though. I would trust him way more than new grads. Sorry new grads, im contributing to your lack of job opportunities.
 
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If all pharmacy schools closed today and not a single pharmD was given, how many years until pharmacists are in demand?

I have already thought of this. If no single pharmD was given starting today, the consensus seems to be around 13+ years for pharmacists to be in demand again.

But OPs question is different, he asked what if no new students would be admitted meaning there will still be 3-4 years worth of graduating classes coming up. So to answer OPs question it would take 16-17 years to end the saturation if schools were not allowed to admit anymore students starting today.
 
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mentos said:
If all pharmacy schools closed today and not a single pharmD was given, how many years until pharmacists are in demand?

I have already thought of this. If no single pharmD was given starting today, the consensus seems to be around 13+ years for pharmacists to be in demand again.

But OPs question is different, he asked what if no new students would be admitted meaning there will still be 3-4 years worth of graduating classes coming up. So to answer OPs question it would take 16-17 years to end the saturation if schools were not allowed to admit anymore students starting today.
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That assumes that there is a 1:1 relationship between one year of oversupply and one year of undersupply. The reality is that with 15,000 new grads each year for 1,500 new jobs, it is about a 1:10 ratio, so for each year of oversupply there will need to be 9 additional years of undersupply in order to equilibrate.

So even if we stopped admitting students today and graduated the 3-4 remaining classes, it will take around 27-36 years for the market to absorb those grads.

Edit: Obviously if this does happen then I would expect many unemployed pharmacists to switch careers altogether instead of waiting around 20 years to land their first job. So attrition should become exponential past a certain point. 2 years maybe?
 
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Pharmacy is a Scam said:
That assumes that there is a 1:1 relationship between one year of oversupply and one year of undersupply. The reality is that with 15,000 new grads each year for 1,500 new jobs, it is about a 1:10 ratio, so for each year of oversupply there will need to be 9 additional years of undersupply in order to equilibrate.

So even if we stopped admitting students today and graduated the 3-4 remaining classes, it will take around 27-36 years for the market to absorb those grads.

Edit: Obviously if this does happen then I would expect many unemployed pharmacists to switch careers altogether instead of waiting around 20 years to land their first job. So attrition should become exponential past a certain point. 2 years maybe?
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Two of my friends are already switching careers. One of them quit cvs (due to obvious reasons) and now cant find anything within driving distance for almost 6 months. She wants to just get a regular desk job lol. Another just got sick of pharmacy bs and decided to go to med school lol he got accepted to the Caribbean one.
 
One way to solve it is if we all refuse to take interns which is something I say we do.
 
I don't see any foreseeable solution. There are simply too many grads who are in a sense equalized by the board exam. No matter how many people you convince to choose another career, more naïve students who haven't done their research or who simply don't care will take their spot. Also, after two years of experience every pharmacist is pretty much the same (of course there are exceptions). This is a very bad thing for our future.
 
DruggieDoRight said:
One way to solve it is if we all refuse to take interns which is something I say we do.
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This would be the best thing to do but schools will start paying more sites to take interns and pass the cost onto the students, putting them even deeper in debt.
 
Always the optimist, I think saturation can be fixed. But, it's going to have to start with pharmacy students and the schools:

1) do not open any new schools
2) shut down underperforming schools
3) decrease enrollments in current schools
4) increase standards and pre-requisites for a hardier candidate pool
5) This one's a stretch, but include back up plans within the pharmacy school curriculum for graduates. Teach them the ins and outs of code, hospital administration, data science, stocks and investments, medical equipment, nutrition and fitness, social work, etc. If you can't expand the pharmacist's clinical role, expand their role in society so they can enact positive changes while still being a quality pharmacist.
6) At the retail level, legislation must check PBMs and increase pharmacy reimbursements. Although I don't have any exact figures, profits that should be going to pharmacists and pharmacies are ending up elsewhere. A well-compensated pharmacist will continue to provide better care for patients than a stressed one.

I understand the majority of SDN'ers on the pharmacy forum are doom and gloom and this post will be ridiculed, but I still have hope for us yet Ü
 
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MilknCheerios said:
Always the optimist, I think saturation can be fixed. But, it's going to have to start with pharmacy students and the schools:

1) do not open any new schools
2) shut down underperforming schools
3) decrease enrollments in current schools
4) increase standards and pre-requisites for a hardier candidate pool
5) This one's a stretch, but include back up plans within the pharmacy school curriculum for graduates. Teach them the ins and outs of code, hospital administration, data science, stocks and investments, medical equipment, nutrition and fitness, social work, etc. If you can't expand the pharmacist's clinical role, expand their role in society so they can enact positive changes while still being a quality pharmacist.
6) At the retail level, legislation must check PBMs and increase pharmacy reimbursements. Although I don't have any exact figures, profits that should be going to pharmacists and pharmacies are ending up elsewhere. A well-compensated pharmacist will continue to provide better care for patients than a stressed one.

I understand the majority of SDN'ers on the pharmacy forum are doom and gloom and this post will be ridiculed, but I still have hope for us yet Ü
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This is like saying the melting ice caps and rising oceans can be reversed. We're 10 years too late.
 
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MilknCheerios said:
Always the optimist, I think saturation can be fixed. But, it's going to have to start with pharmacy students and the schools:

1) do not open any new schools
2) shut down underperforming schools
3) decrease enrollments in current schools
4) increase standards and pre-requisites for a hardier candidate pool
5) This one's a stretch, but include back up plans within the pharmacy school curriculum for graduates. Teach them the ins and outs of code, hospital administration, data science, stocks and investments, medical equipment, nutrition and fitness, social work, etc. If you can't expand the pharmacist's clinical role, expand their role in society so they can enact positive changes while still being a quality pharmacist.
6) At the retail level, legislation must check PBMs and increase pharmacy reimbursements. Although I don't have any exact figures, profits that should be going to pharmacists and pharmacies are ending up elsewhere. A well-compensated pharmacist will continue to provide better care for patients than a stressed one.

I understand the majority of SDN'ers on the pharmacy forum are doom and gloom and this post will be ridiculed, but I still have hope for us yet Ü
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None of your outlined steps will happen because there are too many factions within the pharmacist community and everyone will represent their interests only. Here are the issues with your above proposed steps:

#1: Anyone in academia and anyone wishing to get into academia is going to vote against this because faculty positions are in demand.

#2,3,4: ACPE has already said that they don’t govern this because it would violate antitrust laws and they believe that their accreditation standards are “rigorous” enough already. ACPE, deans of pharmacy schools, the state board of pharmacies and the NAPLEX people are all financially incentivized to keep the current system going. Pharmacy schools make tons of money from student tuition so long as they admit as many students as possible each year. NAPLEX and Board of Pharmacies makes tons of money from from the number of test takers each year and have a monopoly on how much to charge for the exam because everyone has to take it. ACPE keeps its membership high and profits from dues so long as there are students and academicians willing to sign up for their organization. To cap enrollment means all 4 of these entities would lose their revenue streams so it ain’t going to happen.

#5: Too many problems with this one but it comes down to this: you’d need to have the personnel and resources to teach these classes. Personnel-wise, you’d need to have faculty members who have carved out some sort of pathway in these non-traditional areas so that the value of a pharmacist in these areas is already recognized and they have credibility when they’re speaking. When you say that you want to be taught about stocks and investments how exactly is that related to being a pharmacist at all? Unless you bring someone in who has blended the two, then maybe it will make more sense. Resource-wise, you’d also need to have enough faculty to teach these courses at every pharmacy school and we all know that geography plays a huge role here. Do you really think that there are people living in Alaska who are qualified to teach data science? Or people living in rural BFE who don’t have access to technology teaching about stocks and investments? I think not. If you wanted to teach all of this (especially at a level besides basic competence, meaning more than 1 class each) then be prepared for pharmacy school curriculums to expand to 10 years in length and for PGY-25’s to exist in the future.

#6: Ain’t gonna happen because pharmacists work in PBMs too so to “reimburse retail pharmacists more”is the same as “reimburse PBM pharmacists less” and obviously no PBM pharmacist is going to support any bill that hurts PBMs. In addition, there is no value to any pharmacist job that involves dispensing as machines can do that work. It’s a generalism that any well-compensated job will result in better job satisfaction/performance but your comp is tied to the relative value of the job itself, not how well you can perform within the scope of your job. Do you think McDonald’s employees will “perform better” if their salaries were doubled? Of course. But will that ever happen? Nope.
 
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Let the market correct itself man, why intervention?
Let more schools open. Accept more sub-par students. Let the pharmacy profession go down the toilet. Let Amazon take out CVS and Walgreens. Let massive layoffs happen. Let pharm students default on student loans. Then no one will take pharm seriously and won't apply, and ACPE and all the schools can just shut down.:p
 
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DIPEA said:
Let the market correct itself man, why intervention?
Let more schools open. Accept more sub-par students. Let the pharmacy profession go down the toilet. Let Amazon take out CVS and Walgreens. Let massive layoffs happen. Let pharm students default on student loans. Then no one will take pharm seriously and won't apply, and ACPE and all the schools can just shut down.:p
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Same thing happened with law schools 15 years ago but they're still around and students keep wasting their money.
 
mentos said:
Same thing happened with law schools 15 years ago but they're still around and students keep wasting their money.
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when people are so dumb and just wanna throw their $$$ down the toilet, you have to let them. pharm school applicants are adults, and we are not babysitters. they also don't live in a cave, so they deserve all the financial obligations when they sign up for loans.
 
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I am against subpar students going into pharmacy because it hurts us practicing pharmacists and patients as well as themselves. The surplus of new grads leads to lower wages, less job flexibility, worse work conditions, and worse outcomes for patient safety. Many of these new grads are incompetent to the point of being a danger to public safety which undermines our reputation of being one of the most trusted professions.
 
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stoichiometrist said:
I am against subpar students going into pharmacy because it hurts us practicing pharmacists and patients as well as themselves. The surplus of new grads leads to lower wages, less job flexibility, worse work conditions, and worse outcomes for patient safety. Many of these new grads are incompetent to the point of being a danger to public safety which undermines our reputation of being one of the most trusted professions.
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Pharmacists are the most over-educated yet most under-utilized health professionals. For the benefit of public safety and payers, it would be best to flood the market with the least competent students as possible, so that it makes sense for machine learning algorithms and big techs to take over and get rid of this absolute nonsense in pharmacy, just like how legal AI has shaken up the contract/document review business and partially replaced lawyers.
 
stoichiometrist said:
I am against subpar students going into pharmacy because it hurts us practicing pharmacists and patients as well as themselves. The surplus of new grads leads to lower wages, less job flexibility, worse work conditions, and worse outcomes for patient safety. Many of these new grads are incompetent to the point of being a danger to public safety which undermines our reputation of being one of the most trusted professions.
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The best way to change and revolutionize any field is not to blindly hope some deeply corrupt dumb organizations like APhA or ACPE to make much needed but never fulfilled changes, but to leverage technology to completely disrupt the way it works. Just how Uber and Lyft killed taxi business, let Amazon or other promising startups kill retail pharmacy too. Why solving the the deeply-rooted problem nobody has an answer for when you can just get rid of it?
 
DIPEA said:
The best way to change and revolutionize any field is not to blindly hope some deeply corrupt dumb organizations like APhA or ACPE to make much needed but never fulfilled changes, but to leverage technology to completely disrupt the way it works. Just how Uber and Lyft killed taxi business, let Amazon or other promising startups kill retail pharmacy too. Why solving the the deeply-rooted problem nobody has an answer for when you can just get rid of it?
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Problem is medicine doesn't work the same as taxi business. Uber still needs drivers so unless they come up with self-driving cars, you can't say that you've changed the business entirely. Amazon cannot kill retail pharmacy like it's killing other retail businesses simply because this involves people's health. As much as people crap on retail pharmacists, there are so much things in retail pharmacy that a pharmacist does a machine or a call center or a mail order cannot replace. Unless amazon is planning on opening physical locations, their only competition is the other mail order pharmacies.
 
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I walked into the Pharmacy at my local HMO and the main Pharmacist there said the job market is in fact so open that nobody even cares what College you attended.
 
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Rich91 said:
unionize and strike
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This has been discussed before.

1) The public does not feel sorry for pharmacists that make over 6 figures when "all they do is put pills in a bottle".
2) It would look silly for 2-3 pharmacists to stand outside a store holding signs
3) Most pharmacists are bad with money. How many months can you go without getting paid especially if you have loans?
4) Your supervisor can literally replace you in a day.
 
DIPEA said:
Let the market correct itself man, why intervention?
Let more schools open. Accept more sub-par students. Let the pharmacy profession go down the toilet. Let Amazon take out CVS and Walgreens. Let massive layoffs happen. Let pharm students default on student loans. Then no one will take pharm seriously and won't apply, and ACPE and all the schools can just shut down.:p
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Yes it will happennnn, they are moving into insurance companies.
 
DIPEA said:
Let the market correct itself man, why intervention?
Let more schools open. Accept more sub-par students. Let the pharmacy profession go down the toilet. Let Amazon take out CVS and Walgreens. Let massive layoffs happen. Let pharm students default on student loans. Then no one will take pharm seriously and won't apply, and ACPE and all the schools can just shut down.:p
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You sound like the villain from the original Deus Ex.
 
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DIPEA said:
haha, i am just tired of being political correct, and recently started to enjoy going-TRUMP :p
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I get your point of view though. lol, maybe I just want to survive and thrive in the chaos. More chaos in my life allow me to grow into this. Each plan executed perfectly looking out for myself. When people want me in their cult, I reject. Maybe I sound like the villain hahahah
 
PotatoPharmer said:
You sound like the villain from the original Deus Ex.
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what else can i do man? :shrug:
it is going downhill, and it is just so obvious. everybody knows about it, but nobody has a solution. so instead of feeling miserable and s**tty, i will just happily watch everything burns down to the ground. at least it's gonna be a good show:D
 
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DIPEA said:
what else can i do man? :shrug:
it is going downhill, and it is just so obvious. everybody knows about it, but nobody has a solution. so instead of feeling miserable and s**tty, i will just happily watch everything burns down to the ground. at least it's gonna be a good show:D
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lol I really dont want to be the one to make a deep learning program that destroys pharmacy. Dont want to dirty my hands ahahaha
 
Lubeckd said:
I get your point of view though. lol, maybe I just want to survive and thrive in the chaos. More chaos in my life allow me to grow into this. Each plan executed perfectly looking out for myself. When people want me in their cult, I reject. Maybe I sound like the villain hahahah
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Data Scientists in High Demand for Healthcare Providers, Payers

this actually makes me feel much better. at least, the pharmd will still worth something for me and it may help me make other pharmacists and doctors' lives miserable if i do work for a payer LOL:p
 
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Lubeckd said:
lol I really dont want to be the one to make a deep learning program that destroys pharmacy. Dont want to dirty my hands ahahaha
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i will be more to happy to do just that, or at least be part of it.:p
pillpack was established in 2013 and sold for 1 billion in late 2018. at least i will become filthily rich if that does happen.:D
 
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Lubeckd said:
well you sound like a villain, I just get mistaken for one because I am going to work for a hedge fund. lol
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analytics consulting startups too~ help payers squeeze out the very last penny out of their payees, namely doctors and pharmacists :p
 
Lubeckd said:
damn you are terrible, you got a vendetta against the healthcare world LOOL
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why not? they are the big fat pigs that are ready to be slaughtered :p
 
Lubeckd said:
I guess if you want to bring egos down a notch. Yeah that's what you do lol...
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i don't have too much egos, but i do have a big desire to make a ton of $$$.
i am in this pharm school cuz i wanna make myself richer, never a bit to "help" patients. They are good enough to take care of themselves:D
if a profession can't make me $$$, there's gotta be someone's fault somewhere. and i am just not happy with it.
just like a stock man, longing makes no money, then start shorting it~:p
 
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