One of the key issues in planning for the future is to ensure the pharmacy workforce meets the growing demands of the healthcare sector and the needs of the communities that pharmacies serve.
Addressing workforce shortages as we move forward has emerged as a national priority across all business sectors, and community pharmacy is no exception.
The Guild constantly conducts surveys and reviews data to ascertain exactly what the workforce situation is and where its needs in the future will be. Its most recent modelling, established from various surveys and data sources, shows there is a currently a shortage of approximately 2,400 full time equivalent (FTE) pharmacists across Australia.
What is even more worrying is that the identified shortage is growing and shows no signs of easing in the near future.
It is also clear that there is a continuing disparity in how our workforce is distributed with a higher proportion of pharmacists per head of population in cities and metropolitan areas than in regional and rural towns, and remote communities - a maldistribution that has been going on for too long.
These are challenges we need to plan for and address.
But to do so we need accurate and up-to-date information and data. It is difficult to obtain accurate pharmacist vacancy data through traditional recruitment means and this is why the Guild launched a survey at the recent APP2023 conference to collect as much data on pharmacist vacancies as possible.
The Guild’s 2023 Workforce Survey is how we want to get this data, as it comes direct from you – pharmacists who know exactly what is happening in the workforce. The survey is part of the Guild’s Workforce Capability Project which relies on the insights and knowledge of members and pharmacy staff to understand pharmacy workforce needs and issues.
The reason the Guild has taken it on itself to gather workforce data independently is that data from external sources has proved unreliable or not available. And if we want to be ready for the future, we need to build any response on reliable data and information.
Putting this into context, the Guild has found that using data from sources such as recruitment agencies and the like doesn’t capture positions that are filled via referrals, word of mouth, transfers and so on. Also, a trend is for pharmacies to have a single advertisement in a paper, online or through a recruitment agency when in fact they may have several positions needed to be filled.
Gathering accurate and relevant data though the 2023 Workforce Survey will assist advocacy and strategic decision-making relating to primary healthcare within pharmacy now and into the future.
Never has this future planning been more important with huge changes coming to the pharmacy sector through the increasing recognition that pharmacists need to be able to work to their full scope of practice.
Already a number of states and territories have implemented pilot schemes to enable pharmacists to begin providing a wider range of health services to ease pressure on doctors and emergency departments.
The health system is under enormous pressure and many areas of it are at breaking point. Wait times for GPs and emergency department admissions are unacceptably high, and utilising the skills and expertise of pharmacists is a way of addressing that.
So much so that the Federal Minister for Health, Mark Butler has publicly supported pharmacists working to full scope.
On top of that the profession faces the challenges of providing services to a growing aged care cohort, as well as providing services and medicines in aged care facilities. There will also undoubtedly be increased vaccination demands as more and more vaccines available under the National Immunisation Program become available through pharmacies.
But to be fully effective in this new environment of healthcare, we need to have the workforce in place, where and when it is needed, and filling out the 2023 Workforce Survey is a very concrete way you can help lay the foundations for the future.
Full scope of practice, our ageing population and pharmacist services in residential care will increase demands on the workforce and make the pharmacist labour market even tighter. But if we plan now we can be ready for it and provide a skilled and motivated workforce community pharmacy sector able to practise to its full potential – and to the full benefit of patients and the community.
Help us achieve that by filling in the survey.
