While I certainly agree that professional standards should be enhanced in any profession, I do believe that if you have a need or demand to fulfill something, you can't be too fastidious. What I'm referring to is the pharmacist shortage in the US. Everyone complains there are not enough pharmacists in this country, but complaints shouldn't be made as long as it is becoming increasingly more and more difficult each year to become a Pharm.D. Making the requirements more stringent possibly deters otherwise qualified individuals to pursue a career in the pharmaceutical sciences. Therefore, I don't really think anyone should gripe about how much pharmacists are needed. Recently, I've heard from a few individuals, current pharmacists included, that a Pharm.D. will no longer take six years post-secondary study...now another year might be added to total 7 years. Good luck meeting any shortage in that manner. The same thing is happening with nursing, as last year I found out the nursing exam, which I don't know the name of, was revamped to be made more difficult. I'm not suggesting standards should be watered down, but they should remain more or less the same...it is already difficult enough to get into a pharm.d. program and why would 7 years instead of 6 be necessary to practice pharmacy successfully? Explain that.
(You should use paragraph breaks to make it easier for people to read your posts.)
Pharmacists are not part of the general labor population. You can't crank out pharmacists like you can fill waitress vacancies at a restaurant. Therefore, if the point of pharmacy school was to fill vacancies, then each pharmacy school class could have 500-1,000 students. The point of pharmacy school, in this day and age, is to educate students to become professional clinicians. Like so many other health professions, the standards are being raised to reflect the needs of patients and the professions themselves.
If the role of a pharmacist was to simply check if the correct pills went into a patient's prescription bottle, then the Doctorate of Pharmacy degree would not be necessary. A bachelors degree in pharmacy would be more than adequate if the sole purpose of a pharmacist was to check product accuracy.
The PharmD degree allows the pharmacist to practice as a clinician, which is a must in certain jobs and situations. When a patient comes into a retail pharmacy with a complicated prescription, the pharmacist should be able to adequately inform the patient of the drug's proper usage and side effects. The pharmacist also needs to inform the patient of potential drug-drug interactions if the patient is taking it with any other medications. Additionally, the pharmacist needs to have professional judgment, which can be learned in pharmacy school, so that s/he can make an executive decision to call the patient's physician when clarification, dosage adjustment, or a change in the medication is needed. Physicians make mistakes like everyone else. Pharmacists serve as a check in healthcare's delicate checks and balances system.
If a college of pharmacy feels as though certain pre-req courses can be completed in the undergraduate setting, then I do not see a problem with increasing the pre-req program to three years. This would allow students to utilize their time in pharmacy school more wisely. In my opinion, the first semester of my P1 year was a waste of time when I could have been learning more about pharmacy itself. I could have completed all of those courses prior to pharmacy school. If students enter pharmacy school with more courses under their belts, then they could spend less time studying the basics and more time on the essentials.
However the schools want to divide up seven years is up to them. I personally feel that pre-reqs should be two years and pharmacy school should be five years, with the last year completely focused on two or three branches of pharmacy that students plan on going into. One of the greatest benefits of pharmacy school is that the pre-reqs are two years. However, I do not think that the program should be less pharmacy-related to accommodate for general science courses like A&P, Biochemistry, and Biostatistics.
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The important things is that a person is safe and a good parmacist to their patients. No one cares if you graduated with a 4.0 when your working. They care that you know what you are doing!
