Multimedia Reporting (Fred-Musser)

It was 5:30 p.m. when Richard Dixon cracked open a Starbucks double shot espresso. “At least I get 20 percent off the retail price,” Dixon said.
Dixon, a CVS pharmacist, had just received his second call in two weeks to work a double shift from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. “These things are miracle workers,” Dixon said, pointing to the Starbucks can. “Two of these and I’ll be wide awake.” Dixon has been regularly logging overtime hours for a year now, trying to combat the pharmacist shortage that plagues America.
When evaluating the pharmacy industry, the Aggregated Demand Index (ADI), which shows the difficulty in filling open jobs, gave five states its highest score of five and 39 other states a score of more than four. The target ADI rating is a two, which indicates a balance between job openings and qualified candidates.

The pharmacist shortage in Kansas according to the ADI is currently at 4.5 and on the rise. In Kansas specifically, the lack of pharmacists is more likely to get worse before it gets better, Kenneth Audus, dean of the school of pharmacy at KU said.
“More than one-third of pharmacists in the state are older than 50, meaning there could potentially be a large drop-off of pharmacists in the next 10 years,” Audus said.
But the question that experts are now asking themselves is why?
“Part of it is hard for me to understand,” Audus said. “For the most part, pharmacists are paid well and well respected by a majority of the population.”
But not all pharmacists would agree with Audus. Some pharmacists say they feel disrespected, especially in the large chain drug stores, Dixon said.
“I mean, yes, I get paid better than probably 90 percent of people, but what made a lot of pharmacists mad was when this shortage started and the chains would offer kids right out of college more money then they were paying us for the same job. That’s a big slap in the face,” Dixon said.
Jimmy Wong, a pharmacist who used to work for CVS pharmacy, the nation’s largest pharmacy chain, cites the company itself as his reason for leaving the profession.
“The guys who run this company just don’t get it. They don’t even have pharmacy degrees and they want to tell me how to fill prescriptions and how long it should take me to do it,” Wong said.

Wong said he liked his job and the interaction with the customers on a personal level, but in the end, he felt the company was trying to steer him toward filling more prescriptions and spending less time with the customers, which led him to resign.
“I don’t think that’s the way a pharmacy should be run. These people in some sense trust me with their lives, which means there should be some personal connection there, not just me handing them a bottle of medication,” Wong said.
The problems Wong cited are what the customer can come to expect from a pharmacist shortage: less service. The target wait time for a prescription at the two largest pharmacy chains, CVS and Walgreen’s, is 15 minutes.
“I can’t remember a time when the wait was that short,” Matt Sidorous, Overland Park junior said. “I normally just end up leaving and coming back because it’s over an hour wait time.”
According to “Pharmacy Today” fifteen minutes is the average time a pharmacist has to fill a prescription. By 2012 that time is expected to drop to three minutes. This is because of an expected increase of 3.7 billion in the number of prescriptions filled annually.
“That number is really scary,” Dixon said. “Patients need to be counseled on their medications. Especially today, when most people take more than one prescription daily.”
The 2012 projection doesn’t take into account the shortage that some believe will get worse before it get better.
Adding to the overall shortage is an education shortage. The number of pharmacy schools and pharmacy graduates has gone up in recent years, but the average degree time is six years and only 60 percent of graduates will go into a retail pharmacy. To put that in better terms, there are approximately 100 students who will graduate from KU’s pharmacy school this year, 60 of which will go into a retail pharmacy. That’s less than 2 percent of Kansas pharmacists and projections by the ADI show that the state will lose roughly 4 percent this coming year.
Another part of the education equation that may be misleading is the fact that 70 percent of pharmacy students in the nation are female. “Females more often than males chose to work part time because of the expectations society has for them,” Audus said. “Pharmacy is a good career in that aspect. You can still make plenty of money but still have time to raise a family.”
Pharmacies are desperately trying to slow down the shortage, which make it a good time to be a pharmacist, financially speaking. Walgreen’s is offering up to $70,000 sign-on bonus for pharmacists who say they will work two years with the company. On top of that, the average salary nationally for pharmacists is $104,300. Still, the shortage remains.
“I think it’s the stress. There are a lot of medications that need to be filled and filled correctly and when you have big companies telling you it has to be done so fast…” Dixon said, pausing, “Fast and correct don’t always go together.”
Dixon looks at the clock, it is 6 p.m. His second shift has started. Because of the shortage, he hasn’t been able to take a vacation in two years.
He has promised his kids a vacation, but as of yet, he has no sign of when he’ll be able to take it.
“I told my kids I’d take them to Disney World,” Dixon said.