Would you trust any random pharmacist in the whole US to compound things for you or your loved ones? I wouldn't. The kit makes it safer and more standardized, and the manufacturer's facilities are inspected by the FDA. I trust their kits more than a compound some random pharmacist made. It requires less steps and no measuring or calculating at the pharmacy. Even if all the pharmacists in the US were excellent, there would still be a bigger difference in quality between the compounds made by thousands of different pharmacists, than ones made using the kit.
We compound sterile and non-sterile medications all the time at the hospital. I still think the premix IVPBs and compounding kits make things safer. There's more oversight and quality control for the manufacturer than for a regular pharmacy.
If you would prefer a pharmacist who only passed the NAPLEX on the third try and makes mistakes doing calculations 50% of the time to make compounds for you, go for it. I'm not going to trust randoms. Give me the kit any day over a compound. In fact, I'd rather not even have them mix the kit. LOL. I'd rather do it myself. 😛
I understand your point, and I think I would make it like this, which has a different implication than your wording.
I'm not opposed to using technology when it's available. The hell I'm going to use a Class III Torsion Balance when there's an arguably more accurate digital scale out that is very straightforward to use. Likewise, if someone gave me a kit to streamline my process when making omeprazole and it makes my life easier and faster with less errors, great, I'll use that too. I'm not going to avoid the use of technology even if it lowers the competency threshold, because why risk the matter if EZ is handed to you and cost isn't an object. If someone gave me the First kit, I'd use it as it makes my life easy. But I still would know why I was using the kit and know what steps the kit replaces in the same way that advanced IV technology makes life simple but you should still know how to inject stuff into bags.
The only reason that you don't bother learning an antecedent technology is if it is impossible at a practical level to actually use it. I don't think typewriters are a great idea to teach in pharmacy nowadays, because pharmacies in my area of the country no longer are required to maintain one, so learning a typewriter is not generally a productive use of time. You would expect though to make nonsterile, extemporaneous compounds at least every so often in general practice (and sterile compounds in hospital practice), so having some sense for the chemistry and pharmaceutics involved still is worth something. Unlike oldtimer's era, you don't necessarily memorize formulas like they did as the likelihood of direct preparation from scratch is not common anymore, but the background knowledge of why those formulations work still is a practice-relevant knowledge base.
I actually think pharmacists (in all generations) should be able to figure out the basic dosing preparation rules by themselves, and no, not at 50%, and I expect that either they know enough physical pharmacy to know the sort of problems around making something and what stability issues and being able to look it up properly. If this is a reasonably common thing to see in your practice, I would hope that you did the homework in finding out the most resource-effective personal way to get something done. But unlike the techs, I do expect pharmacists to know enough about the generalities of practice to know what they don't know or don't routinely practice that if confronted with a situation that is outside the norm, that they have reasonable judgment to still get the task done correctly. Pharmacists should know enough to know where to look, what factors to consider, and how to follow the instructions for making the preparation with the sort of professional instructions that are generally written including the FSAR (fiant secundum artem regulas) parts even if they don't know the method beforehand. That's the skillpart of our profession, the techs can do the grunt work but we ought to know what to do and why we do it.
But yes, in the same way that I don't trust every general surgeon to do a straightforward lance a boil, not every pharmacist has the competency to actually follow instructions on how to prepare medications. That's when they are suitable for have a pulse jobs like mail order.
