If you don't mind, can you expand on the bolded part? When you say "forecasts," are you referring to the predictions from ~10+ years ago that pharmacists would become more central healthcare providers and all that?
Not quite. There's two levels of statistics:
1. The US Department of Labor has a specific obligation in conjunction with the Selective Service to enumerate every single health care professional and whether they are in active practice or not including women. This includes basically any of the health professions, but when you apply for a license in any state, much of the reason why the data collection is standardized is due to requirements for reporting to the Selective Service's Health Care Personnel Delivery System.
https://www.sss.gov/About/Medical-Draft-in-Standby-Mode. For medicine, there's some differentation involved which the labor economists work with AMA and AOA on to at least separate primary care providers and general surgeons. Pharmacy is treated as a catch-all still, and if this system is ever activated, the roles that we are assigned to are more textbook pharmacist in nature (basic hospital, basic long-term care, and basic community/retail). The reason for the reporting of where you work is to get a census of this, so the planners can make general estimates of who is working where and how many providers of this sort can be made available through this system. So, when you get your license, unless you are already part of the uniformed services (including USPHS), you're put on that HCPDS list until some age in case there's a particular need to get a bunch of us somewhere and organized fast. These statistics are not very well kept for pharmacy because there are two groups of pharmacists (the ones that graduated between 75 and 82 and the ones at present) who nominally keep their licenses but do not work due to job unavailability or family concerns. So, simply counting active licenses per SSN doesn't work, they need to figure out how many of us actually engage in practice as well as being licensed. These statistics for reasons discussed on the boards and including family leave to have children make available on paper more pharmacists than actually practice. On the other hand, the reserve pool of pharmacists is big enough that chains have used data from this system to figure out what the overages are in areas. The HCPDS system is not active at this point, but the data collection is implemented for a day when we'll need it. While we're waiting, we do want to improve our collection processes and try to figure out unused labor pools. There's also interest from the Department of Homeland Security about getting this system more accurate as well for their own intentions. Forecasts for the HCPDS is 90% of what I'm concerned about when I refer to forecasts, not the half baked ones the societies make. These numbers feed back to the Department of Education for estimations on how many PharmD loans should they be seeing and whether increases are expected or not based on the current license census and the active practitioner list. For the Department of Labor, they have a small influence on how the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services allocates the medical training budget. For the day to day pharmacist, I'm sure you've never heard of the fed involvement nor even the fact that the HCPDS system exists. That's well and good for all of us; I hope the feds never activate that system fully.
2. There's a different level beyond that which works with Department of Justice and Department of Energy on who has acquisition authority for Scheduled substances, but also regulated chemicals in manufacturing. So, they want to basically know who among us actually uses the ordering authority, so that they are monitored and trained properly. There's tight oversight down to the invoice level for Schedule II's as most of us deal with on a weekly basis, but there's also the matter of trying to source those regulated chemicals and their distribution channels at present. While many pharmacists have the legal authority to put themselves in a position to purchase them for patient dispensing, there's quotas nationally that are divided among the states and patient bases.
http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/quotas/quota_history.pdf.
Yes, the controlled substances legal distribution market is a textbook Soviet-style command economy where the DEA sets strict policies on how much of these substances may be imported or manufactured which is passed down from manufacture to wholesaler to pharmacy to patient. The Department of Justice forecasts the number of pharmacists serving patients for a much different reason, in general the fewer the pharmacists around per capita, oddly enough, the more variable the amount that the oversight area purchases. We're getting to the point where it's possible to coordinate the State PDMP programs with the DEA quotas to give the manufacturers and wholesalers better planning data.
Without giving away my brand of politics, let's just say that the implementation of 1 and 2 is what you would expect for a large bureaucracy to do, and when it fails, it fails the profession really badly when planning. For the first, it's hard to figure out how to really summarize the profession right now as it's hard to figure out how many out there now have nontraditional working arrangements (not FT or PT by the normal definition). From my peon cheap seats, it's an entertaining problem to deal with, but its not academic to me as I do want some happy medium between genuine employment and patient safety.