Hospital pharmacists please chime in

[ornithoptor]

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I see a tons of threads that talk about pay cut, hours cut, saturation, lack of jobs in the retail setting. However, that may not paint a proper picture as information from the hospital side is missing.

I work for a large hospital system and I see things much differently. Rising salary, competitive pays, decent benefit, great PTO plan. We have about 50 positions posted at this moment for our core 13 hospitals. We pay our staff up to 66 to 70 dollars. We still struggle to fill those positions. Out competitor poaches our employees with even higher pay.

There is a saturation. Some jobs at retail are like hell. However, we still need to present balanced information to our young.

Could we have other pharmacists who work in hospitals to chime in on this topic? I would like to see comments from hospital staff on pay, job security, benefit, and happiness.

Why am I asking this?

There are slew of prospective students who dropped out of pharmacy schools based on discussion of this forum or their retail experience only. My concerns is that decision to join pharmacy and decision to drop out are both made in haste and with incomplete research. One person dropped out because first day at CVS was lousy without ever explore hospital setting.

Please share your thoughts. Thanks.

 

[steveysmith54]

maybe it's all Location Location Location.

My hospital last hired two Graveyard RPh who both had PGY2 training.

 

[lord999]

(Listening to Lead Belly's Take This Hammer while writing this)
I'm hospital, but I'd disagree that it's that far unbalanced. It is very difficult to obtain a standard hospital job with no experience right now, and even with residencies, there's so much red tape and credential chasing now that it's a major investment for a job that we used to train informally. I'm ecstatic about my job security, iron rice bowl pension, early retirement possibilities (a RIF is in planning right now at OHRM for a major outsourcing initiative), and quite satisfied with my compensation. I am not happy about the amount of hospital politics that seem to be inevitable with hospital work. I find hospital work just as boring as outpatient chains, and I know of positions that are quite hell in the institutions. But, if you are a marginal pharmacist that hides behind everyone else in a queue, well, of course institutional pharmacy is the way to go.

VA national salary surveys for compensation and adjustment have come back flat or declining for the four regions which are leading to discussions at OHRM (Office of Human Resource Management) concerning downward pay for retention (almost all retention bonuses are cancelled for pharmacists within the VA now outside of the Central Office or Director grade). They are almost at the point where EDRP will not come to new graduates unless they were uniformed as we don't have a problem recruiting anymore except for the extreme rural areas. That said, we are still seeing pay increases for rural and smaller cities (mostly county seats), but the university towns and major medical centers have been definitely flat. For my area, where I personally know every single hospital's salary schedule (including the private ones), management recruits are still hard to recruit (the local medical center fires them on a q 2 year basis. I'm glad your hospital is exceptional, but it really is. That top code is actually lower than my region ($75-$78 is the top code for the two major centers and the one that is at $65 happens to pay better benefits as it's Mayo).

Not to give an ad hominem argument, but with my consultant hat on, if you're paying well, yet have so many open positions, that's usually a management or an organizational (location, HR) problem. Even $10 additional bucks/hour should not be something that gets pharmacists (especially senior pharmacists with a lot built into the system) to leave in our general circumstances. And if compensation is the only reason why people are leaving, I'd strongly argue that the environment is a major factor. If you have an environment so bland (or hostile) that it seems that easy for employees to defect or leave behind, that is a major fault in an institutional setting from an employee loyalty standpoint as a hospital should be more of a home to their staff than retail. That sort of mismatch usually has an internal reason at this point. That, and you're hiring the wrong people if money is their only motivator (Machiavelli and mercenaries is instructive).

Hell, even when VA, the IHS, or the DoD are a hellhole (and it's getting back to that now), it speaks something to the mission that we have a talented (and not so talented) bunch of diehards who are still tied to the system for far less pay than what you're offering. Money is motivating, but is not the only motivation. Honorable work with friendly colleagues is part of the compensation package especially in the institutional environments, and something is causing a failure to thrive where you are at that you ought to research as a new director. But for mature systems that pay the market rate, we don't have a problem with recruitment and especially retention, everyone knows how good they have it here, and those who remain, we value their experience appropriately (and their sloth because of their experience!) enough to retain them despite the market paying more outside. If your hospital chain was in my area, I would warn my students to be wary of any institution that seems to have such a deep bench of recruits to fill considering the job environment unless they were a new Certificate of Need hospital like Regions is building in Minneapolis at present.

 

[owlegrad]

I appreciate the spirit of this thread, but we have a thread for discussing the job market. So let's use that to discuss the job market.