Q&A: New Career Priorities Emerge for Pharmacists After COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped pharmacy careers, pushing many pharmacists to reconsider their priorities and career goals. Burnout, long hours, and evolving patient demands have led to a greater focus on well-being, flexibility, and career mobility. To retain talent, the profession must expand access to new roles, training pathways, and tech-driven opportunities.

Q&A: New Career Priorities Emerge for Pharmacists After COVID-19 / Drazen - stock.adobe.com

Drug Topics® recently sat down with Brianne Bakken, PharmD, MHA, associate professor at the University of Iowa College of Nursing and an author on the National Pharmacist Workforce Study, to discuss how changes in the work environment since the COVID-19 pandemic have affected the overall well-being and career satisfaction of pharmacists and what resources or support are most critical to help pharmacists thrive professionally and personally.

Drug Topics: How have changes in the work environment since the COVID-19 pandemic affected the overall well-being and career satisfaction of pharmacists?

Brianne Bakken, PharmD, MHA: I think COVID-19 impacted everyone, not just health care professionals, but health care workers were hit especially hard. It's the middle of a global pandemic and you're coming into work to take care of patients. Some of our work in the National Pharmacist Workforce Study showed that one of the drivers of satisfaction, and continues to be positive for pharmacists, is this sense of purpose. “My work provides value and I'm contributing to the greater good by taking care of patients.” That was still there during the pandemic. However, now you have pharmacists that are under a lot of stress thinking about themselves getting sick or potentially getting their family sick at home. They're putting in longer hours, picking up shifts to take cover for colleagues that have been infected and can't come to work. You've got shortages of drugs, of PPE and starting to roll out the COVID-19 vaccines. On top of that, you're starting to deal with misinformation and unfortunately, difficult patients—patients that are scared, angry, confused.

I think that sense of purpose and feeling like you're doing something for the greater good that can really only get you so far, and eventually pharmacists just started to burn out. I think the pandemic went on longer than anyone really expected, and so it's like that fight or flight response. In the midst of it, your adrenaline kicks in. You do what you have to do, but you can only sustain that for so long. That's where the burnout really started to hit.

The other big thing is, again, for everyone, not just health care workers, but COVID-19 really forced people to think about what they value. Watching people die and pass away around you, being stuck at home, or having to come into work if you're a health care worker, people really started to realize they value their health, their well-being, time spent with family and friends. Now we're really starting to see pharmacists make decisions based on those values. They're looking for employers, positions and work environments that facilitate well-being, where they can have positive mental and physical health, potentially the ability to work from home, and schedule flexibility. They want to be able to make it to Johnny's baseball game. They want to be able to navigate that personal and work balance and be able to do both well. They're really starting to change their work decisions based on those things.

Drug Topics: What resources or support are most critical to help pharmacists thrive professionally and personally?

Bakken: One of the things that I continually come back to in thinking about enabling pharmacists to make these career changes and pivots is an opportunity for improvement in residency training. As a residency graduate myself, I think residency training is immensely valuable. It's really hard to force new graduates to make that decision right away. We know in looking back historically at data, it's really hard for a practicing pharmacist who's working making a certain wage but wants to make a pivot and needs residency to go back and do it. It's not impossible, but it's less likely. How do we create opportunities and pathways?

There are some institutions out there that do a nontraditional residency, where practicing pharmacists can go do this training. They do it over an extended period of time, so that it's less of a pay cut. They can actually work during part of it, and it makes it more accessible. How do we do more of that? Or how do we create other tracks that maybe don't require residency, but you can get that additional training? Maybe it's through board certification or other pathways to help pharmacists make those career pivots.

How do we allow for those kinds of pivots and changes? I think it is really critical. Looking forward, there's a lot of discussion and talk about the impact of AI and what that mean for pharmacists. How do we upskill and reskill existing pharmacists in the workforce to be prepared for new roles and leveraging technology? It's very reminiscent of vaccine education and training. New grads were coming out with vaccine certifications and were able to do that, but if you graduated before that, how do you now upskill pharmacists and train them to be able to administer vaccines? We did that well as a profession. We're probably going to reach a pivot point where it's going to be very similar for AI technology or maybe even some new services where we need to have a plan to be able to roll that out to pharmacists that want to take that on that weren't trained for that originally.

READ MORE: Why More Pharmacists Are Exploring Nontraditional Roles

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