I've read about people who question the utility of this joint degree, which I understand.
I'm mostly interested in the program for one of three reasons:
1. I think it would be interesting to work part-time in both professions. Many pharmacist positions these days are part-time and many PA positions are only three or so days a week. A program like this may be able to create a more varied work life to cut the monotony of both professions.
2. I desire to become a pharmacist more than a PA. With the uncertainty and negativity of the pharmacy field (just peruse comments from a view choice people in the pre-pharm section), the PA degree will provide me with a safety net to fall back on if the sky really does fall for pharmacists.
3. Being primarily a PA. I can see the additional degree and drug knowledge as being a plus for being marketable. However, the draw of this program is that they waive the paid experience requirement. As someone who hasn't worked a paid healthcare job for 3+ years, this path is the only path that would allow me to become a PA without that large amount of experience.
Anyone please correct me if they think I'm being naive or something.
1. I've seen people switch both ways (from pharmacy to PA and backwards) with the spectrum of results depending on how thoughtful they were. The limitation is that both are mid-level in some senses (pharmacy is actually terminal for certain functions), but if you want to actually care directly for patients, pharmacy is a poor substitute for a primary clinical job. However, being a PA compared with MD/DO practice is kind of the same way a pharmacy tech is to pharmacy, there are plenty of pharmacy techs that are better workers and smarter than pharmacists, but the stupidest and laziest pharmacist still is a pharmacist, and the techs always get the lower level work. The career trajectory is that PA's have a fairly fun and awesome early practice, but increasingly either have to make peace with being an MLP or be frustrated about their leash. I sincerely hope that those who go to PA school are ok with the limited investment, limited commitment aspect as I think that's really a plus.
While it is conceivable that a PA and PharmD in the same person could do both, in practice from the ones I know, they commit to one or the other as other things come up.
2. It's not just pharmacy where the sky has fallen, it's healthcare itself. It happened to physical therapists (if there was a PT forum in the early 2000s, they would be griping the same way that the pharmacists are griping now about everything going to hell). But for PA and NPs, there's already a projected oversupply, so you're basically going to have probably 5-10 years of employment and then the struggle you see here as pharmacists did who graduated in the early 00s. It's not getting any easier on dentists, physicians, or osteopaths based on CPT treadmills. Yet, another reason to consider not overinvesting in health care.
3 and 4. No, you're not a physician, you're a mid-level practitioner. Let's take even a broader case, a physician who happens to have a pharmacy background. Even pharmacists who are physicians, yeah, it's nice to know pharmacy when practicing medicine as there's certain things that come naturally and getting on the P&T Committee at a hospital is pretty straightforward, but you just don't do the pharmacy work as a physician (and if you are, you're basically paying to work as a pharmacist). Physicians who know what they are doing drop the dogsbody work (guideline following, the simple presented cases) on PAs and clinical pharmacists and exploit them for CPT reimbursement. There is a useful future where MD's basically own a stable of PA's and NP's to run patients through the CPT generation factory and skim off the top as passive income. Urgent care and anesthesiology works like this now. (And there are quite a few physician groups where senior partner MD's exploit junior MD's, this is a particular problem in Surgery where senior surgeons take advantage of junior surgeon egomania to screw them over financially).
4. (The question that you didn't ask yourself.) Who do you want to be exploited by for labor?
The majority of pharmacists either work in a corporate pharmacy setting which values the bottom line or hospitals who value the bottom line. It is possible as a pharmacist to go into business for themselves as pharmacy is a terminal profession for something, but this is unlikely. Pharmacists are actual employees of both types (trust me, CVS and Walgreens tried to figure out if they could 1099 staff pharmacists, they can't), so even though corporate governance is a PITA, you do get rewarded for it every two weeks, and that's with a decent medical and dental plan. It's also normal to scale work in terms of shifts for the majority of the profession (going to and from part time status is not extremely difficult).
The majority of PA's work directly for physicians and the minority work for systems that are nominally supervised by physicians (e.g. the urgent care CPT Farm). You are not allowed to work on your own, and you are not going to own the means for production unless you hire a physician yourself in your company. PA work can be a contractor relationship or a direct employee, but the terms are much more variable than pharmacy and like other MLPs (and RDH's in particular) there seems to be age discrimination in their hiring in a way that pharmacy and nursing doesn't as direct employees (not that they don't face it, but it's widely commented upon even in the schools that there's no such thing as an ugly PA in a private practice even considering the job market).
This is also the pharmacist forum, so of course I'm biased toward pharmacy, but that's also because it's the one health profession that does not require being personally extroverted, having good manners, or appreciable bedside manner for what I trained for. I find the need to have those characteristics necessary for being a PA.
If you are going to choose, why not medicine? You probably need to rule that out before you think about pharmacy versus PA considering that you seem to have the kind of time to think about it.
