Farmacy School Follies: Or How My School Trains Pharmacists Not to be Pharmacists

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Pharmer1921

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Hello all, I am a student at the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Class of 2020. Today, our Dean presented us with a "unique" opportunity. He, our Dean, let the student body know we will, in the short future, be able to do a PharmD/NP pathway. Yes, you are reading that correctly. Pharmacy schools are now training their pharmacists to not be pharmacists in response to the mess they created. I would like to get people's opinion on this. A girl in the class above us asked why they are moving away from training people to be pharmacists and the Dean responded that instead of fighting for pharmacist prescribing rights this will be an easier pathway. The school will go public with this information in January.

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How is this possible? To be an NP, one must first be a nurse.

The PharmD/PA thing has been done, rather unsuccessfully.
He told us they had the legal stuff worked out, and everything is ready to go. I have no answer for your question.
 
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Please keep us updated on the details of this (interesting/unique) program.

Pharmacy schools seem to lack focus on what's important (basic drug, OTC knowledge, drug literature review, guideline based prescribing/level of evidence, etc.) for pharmacists. They are making pharmacists a jack of many trades, master of none.

I can see it now....elderly patient inquires RPh/NP about BMs over the phone...10 minutes later said elderly comes into pharmacy requesting RPh/NP to administer enema.
 
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Pay to be trained in two professions, work in one. Smart move for your school.
 
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Guess Jack Cole ran out of ideas then. Ah well, maybe U of A will finally achieve their dream of producing overambitious, underperforming prescribers because they're just too good for menial pharmacy tasks like actually communicating with patients and keeping a hospital afloat.
 
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Keep us posted. This sounds even worse than the PharmD/PA program. Isn't an NP already like a 3-year track with the RN program included? How many courses from pharmacy would even cross over? People are going to do this crap and then do a 2-year residency too?
 
If you end up graduating with an NP degree in addition to the Pharm.D., complete a 1-year residency in an NP specialty to make yourself competitive in the NP job market, get a good job as an NP, and forget the Pharm.D. part
 
Guess Jack Cole ran out of ideas then. Ah well, maybe U of A will finally achieve their dream of producing overambitious, underperforming prescribers because they're just too good for menial pharmacy tasks like actually communicating with patients and keeping a hospital afloat.

Cole's a few deans in the past at this point. This Dean is brand new, replacing the one who is in the middle of a criminal trial (he receives his full salary still, which explains the increased class sizes from 100-140).
 
Cole's a few deans in the past at this point. This Dean is brand new, replacing the one who is in the middle of a criminal trial (he receives his full salary still, which explains the increased class sizes from 100-140).

Officially, yes, but Jack's always hung around the place unofficially to help sort things out with the U of A good old boys administration network and with Pima County (and this is not a sinister implication, Jack actually does want to help for the right reasons and there's some realities at U of A that just have to be dealt with). The mention was more from the fact that it wasn't a clinical matter (I don't think Jack's ever has been especially concerned with that, more that his graduates had jobs), but whether or not the college could remain relevant and financially afloat which is always perilous with the AZ legislature and U of A oversight.

As for U of A's attitude toward practice, that's been over 20-30 years in the making, and it's kind of sad that they are going this route. They should have stuck to their guns and punched through a revised practice act if prescribing is really what they want. There are a couple of notable dual practitioners in the state, Mary Lou Brubaker being one of the few examples, but for us normal rank and file, I think the outright dual practitioner route is a bad idea as we really won't utilize either effectively as much as being a sole practitioner with extended privileges unless you're really dedicated to making it work (and let's be honest with ourselves, how could that be motivational in settings that don't already have extended privileges like the VA or a health system?).

Oh, and I'm sure it's going to be real awkward for the administration office now that Lyle is cleared from criminal liability and that the university is not in a position to restore him as Dean. That's going to be an expensive bailout. The student size is completely related to college revenue. Educating pharmacists is always a money-losing venture, so depending on state generosity, the class size at U of A fluctuated between as low as 30 to 60 even in the 2000s. That's why they were adamant about only admitting AZ and WICHE for the longest time, because they did not have the capability of subsidizing out of state entrants otherwise.
 
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A Np/PharmD who have extensive knowledge about medications and CAN prescribe.
Sounds like you could work at CVS both the pharmacy and the Minute clinic.
 
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A Np/PharmD who have extensive knowledge about medications and CAN prescribe.
Sounds like you could work at CVS both the pharmacy and the Minute clinic.
Don’t give Larry any ideas.
 
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In 10 years a NP degree is going to be worthless, and/or everyone will have one. This is messed up.
 
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There is a market for these programs, but it's a small market. The market is "professional" students, people who don't ever want to actually work, so they just collect degree, after degree, after degree (usually for psychological reasons, if they were lazy, they wouldn't even want to keep going to school.) There is no job related reason why someone would want to have a PharmD/MD or PharmD/NP or pretty much anything else, with the maybe exception of PharmD/PhD if one really wanted to do research. The people signing up for these dual programs also aren't going to actually work at either of the 2 degrees they are getting....instead after graduating, they will just sign to get yet another different degree.
 
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I really don't get the rationale behind this idea. Everyone is pushing residency who would get an NP?
This makes it look like we don't know what the pharmacist's role is in the healthcare system and cheapens our degree. Not to mention what @Rouelle mentioned about being NPs without even being a nurse.
 
one can spin this degree any way they choose, to me it means we recognize that the profession is dying, we can't guarantee jobs anymore; lets spice things up with two extra letters after your name.
 
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one can spin this degree any way they choose, to me it means we recognize that the profession is dying, we can't guarantee jobs anymore; lets spice things up with two extra letters after your name.

At the very least, those two extra letters after their names will allow this program's graduates to find jobs upon graduating. The deans of the pharmacy school are probably approaching this as a last ditch effort to prevent their post-graduation job placement numbers from tanking. Even if only 10% of their graduates get pharmacist jobs and the remaining 90% get NP jobs, that's still advertised as a 100% job placement rate.
 
So even more training to make a lower salary (NP market rate)? No thanks.
 
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