Addressing the shortage of pharmacy faculty and clinicians: The impact of demographic changes

Abstract

Federal capitation payments during the 1970s helped stimulate growth in student and faculty numbers. Although capitation was discontinued in the early 1980s, the intended effect of increasing resources to expand clinical education was achieved. With the approaching end of the first decade of the 21st century, many of the faculty who began careers during the capitation period will retire, creating opportunities for midcareer, minority, and female faculty. The transition period will be short and with the continued increases in class size and the number of accredited or planned pharmacy schools, the competition for clinical and basic science faculty and senior academic leadership will be intense. As a temporary solution to the shortage of faculty members, colleges of pharmacy will seek new partnerships with health care systems to provide teaching resources for clerkship rotations. However, it cannot be assumed that health systems will have the capacity to absorb additional students, nor can it be expected that health systems will have the financial resources to provide relief time or hire additional clinical specialists to support advanced clerkship education. Strategies such as paying for clerkship rotations are not universally accepted within academia and do not provide sufficient revenue to the health system to offset the costs of training and mentoring. The career paths for health-system-based clinical specialists and clinical faculty often intertwine, so academia and health-system pharmacy do share some responsibility for identifying the factors that affect the supply and demand for pharmacists.1 To address this need, the ASHP Board of Directors on September 23, 2005 commissioned the Task Force on Pharmacy’s Changing Demographics to study trends for hospital and health-system pharmacy. The Task Force is studying ways in which hospital and health-system pharmacy practice can capitalize on the evolving demography of the profession to improve its contributions to patient care.