: SYRACUSE — Mirroring national trends, pharmacists are in hot demand across upstate New York as the population ages, prescription-drug usage rises, and drug stores expand.
Beginning salaries on average of $95,000, company-stock-purchase options, extensive health-insurance packages, tuition reimbursement, discounts on purchases, and even special home-loan programs are just some of the perks drug stores are using to entice pharmacists to join.
Christine Verrillo, a pharmacist at Lyncourt Drug of Syracuse and an officer with the Onondaga County Pharmacists Society, says she and other pharmacists are constantly being solicited for job openings. Lyncourt Drug is owned and operated by Henderson’s Drug Store, Inc., a six-store, independent chain based in Penn Yan.
Job opportunities abound for pharmacists, adds David Setta, a Binghamton pharmacist who represents the Pharmacists Society of New Southern Tier chapter.
“It’s virtually impossible — you have to try really hard to be unemployed,” continues Setta, an Eckerd pharmacist on Robinson Street on Binghamton’s East Side.
“There’s a shortage of pharmacists everywhere, and the Southern Tier is no different,” he added.
“From all the predictions I’ve seen, there is going to be no end to the shortage,” Setta notes.
Hiring or sign–on bonuses and referral bonuses offered by drug-store chains are not uncommon, says Santo Garro, owner of the one-store, independent, Garro Drug Store of Utica.
“Everybody does it,” he said of the chains and the use of hiring and referral bonuses, particularly when they need to fill a vacancy in small–population areas such as Lake Placid, Saranac Lake, or Plattsburgh. Garro is president of the State Pharmacist Society’s Mohawk Valley chapter.
Indeed, the findings of a report by the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA) — a national association representing pharmacy benefit managers — suggest a robust job market likely will continue over the next 10 years for pharmacists in chain drugstores, supermarkets, independent pharmacies, hospitals, and mail-service operations.
The PCMA also cites a Money magazine and Salary.com survey in April that notes the demand for pharmacists is exploding as the population ages and new medications are developed.
By 2010, the number of prescriptions filled is expected to rise 27 percent to 4.1 billion, according to the Money/Salary.com survey.
Pay rises
Today, the average salary of Albany College of Pharmacy (ACP) of Union University graduates is about $95,000, school officials note.
“Three years ago, it was in the high 70s,” ACP communications director Ronald Lesko recalls.
ACP officials noted graduates this year had, on average, two job offers to consider.
ACP is one of the few schools in upstate New York that produces pharmacists.
According to the PCMA survey, the expected 2006 median, total-cash compensation for a staff pharmacist nationally is $98,300 compared to $93,300 in 2005, an increase of 5.4 percent.
Similar increases were also seen for other related pharmacy professions, including pharmacy-operations manager, pharmacy-team manager, clinical pharmacist, technician, and new graduates of pharmacy schools, the association noted. And that doesn’t count the other incentives drug-store chains use to entice pharmacists to join their ranks.
Drug-store chains like CVS and Walgreens have even teamed up with the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) to promote coming to their companies.
“Whether you’re looking for a flexible part-time position in one of our over 6,000 stores, a pharmacist or management career, or you have the experience and skills as a senior executive, take a look at what CVS/Pharmacy has to offer,” CVS’s Web site states in encouraging retirees, 50 years and older, to consider returning to the work force.
Walgreens is the latest national player to move into Central New York, and the Southern Tier. Walgreens is building a store in Johnson City.
As of May 31, Walgreens operated 5,251 drugstores in 45 states and Puerto Rico, versus 4,837 a year ago, the company noted in a June 26 statement.
The Walgreens’ game plan is to grow to 7,000 stores in 2010. The company has about 1,300 approved new locations and thousands of additional targeted, potential sites throughout the United States, says Walgreens’ CEO and Chairman David Bernauer in a statement released on June 26. The drug store chain reported store sales increased 12.4 percent to a record $12.2 billion for the third quarter and 11.1 percent to $35.2 billion for the first nine months.
Store growth causes shortage
“There is a shortage [of pharmacists] nationwide,” says Mehdi Boroujerdi, dean of the Albany College of Pharmacy, “but that’s really because of the expansion of the chain drugstores.” And, while the shortage may continue for the next five to 10 years, Boroujerdi says the store expansion ultimately will slow.
The dean also notes that pharmacist shortage is in rural areas, and not in large metropolitan regions.
And that’s when the added perks, such as higher salaries, hiring bonuses, even automobiles, are used entice prospective pharmacists to join a chain.
Setta of Binghamton points out another cause for the druggist shortage is the requirement imposed several years ago that calls for pharmacy students to receive a doctor of pharmacy degree, a six-year program, rather than the previous five-year academic program requirement.
Mark Brackett, vice president for human resources at the Gouverneur–based Kinney Drugs Inc., says the Central New York chain faces the same pressures to fill its pharmacist vacancies.
Brackett says the drug-store chain has developed close ties and relationships with pharmacy schools throughout the Northeast — participating in job fairs and other school functions — in order to meet and hire new pharmacists.
Kinney also encourages its pharmacists to lecture at different pharmacy schools.
“It’s a nice opportunity,” he says, to meet with potential pharmacist candidates.
Kinney has 80 retail stores — 67 in upstate New York and 13 in Vermont — as well as three institutional pharmacies that cater to nursing homes, long-term care centers, and correctional facilities, says company spokeswoman Stephanie LaDue. Brackett also points to the company’s in-house pharmacy technician-training program as another way to “try to have the best support staff” and provide better working conditions.
Garro says, however, as an independent, one-store pharmacy, he is hard-pressed to compete against the large drug-store chains and their inducements when looking for a new pharmacist.
“They offer all kinds of benefits; it’s expected,” he says.
“I would have to offer $20,000 over what the chains offer,” Garro says, as well as come up with a similar benefit package to attract candidates to consider leaving a chain, coming to a small, independent pharmacy. That, many times, is financially impossible, he says.
Instead, Garro says: “You have to be a special person to work for a community pharmacy.”
Pharmacy schools
The New York State Education Department’s Office of the Professions, which licenses pharmacists, reported there were 19,166 licenses as of Jan. 1, 2004, for the entire state. There were 590 licenses issued in 2004, and another 717 issued in 2005, according to the agency’s latest report on its Web site.
A new pharmacy school will open its doors this fall to add more people to the pharmacy graduate pool. New York State currently has only four schools that offer pharmaceutical degrees, only two of which are in Upstate.
The four are: St. John’s University’s College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions in Queens; the Arnold & Marie Schwartz College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Long Island University, Brooklyn; the University at Buffalo’s School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences; and ACP, the oldest pharmacy school in New York State and one of the only private, independent pharmacy schools in the United States.
However, seeing an impending shortage of pharmacists in Central and Western New York, St. John Fisher College in Pittsford (near Rochester) will open its new Wegmans School of Pharmacy this fall — thanks to a donation from the late Robert B. Wegman, former chairman of Wegmans Food Markets, Inc.
Wegman donated $5 million in January 2005 to fund the building of the new school of pharmacy.
The 37,000-square-foot building bearing Wegman’s name is expected to open this August, with an expected first-year enrollment of 50 students this fall, school officials say. Total cost of the new building was estimated at about $7 million. The three-story school, adjacent to the college’s Skalny Science Center, will contain classrooms, laboratory space, and offices for faculty and administration. It will be connected to the science center by a two-story atrium.
Contact Erbstoesser at greg@tgbbj.com
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