A Conversation With ... Paul Gubbins

This fall will mark the 10-year anniversary of the UMKC School of Pharmacy satellite campus at MSU. Tell me about the impact of the program.
We have faculty in town, one at Jordan Valley, one at MSU Care, one at Mercy, one at Cox, and then one down in Branson. And in most of those places, obviously with the exception of Cox and Mercy, our faculty are the only pharmacists in those sites. I think Jordan Valley is one example of an impact. When we hired our first faculty, Lisa Cillessen, she improved some of their metrics for chronic disease illness. Then when COVID hit, they put her in charge of developing the infusion centers for monoclonal antibodies. The same is true at MSU Care, where we have Brandi Bowers, and she works with the underprivileged in Springfield and has been really a leader in that clinic. So, they’ve really set the tone. Community Partnership of the Ozarks actually funds an internship off their grants for our students. It allows our students to go out and do things like opiod education, safe medication use. That’s been a pipeline for national awards for our students. In terms of our students, we’ve done really well in that department up until the last couple of years. There’s a nationwide decline in applicants to pharmacy school, and we’ve seen that as well. Up until two years ago, we were traditionally running 23 to 30 students; we’re seated for 30 students. And in the last two years, we haven’t hit the 20 mark. Hopefully that’ll turn around. We graduate upwards of 96% from here. They have no problem finding jobs. We have a first placement rate of around 98% or so.

The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy said applicants and graduates to pharmacy schools is the lowest in 40 years. But then at the same time, they cited a stat of almost 61,000 job postings for pharmacy positions in 2023, an 18% increase over the year before. What are the factors causing this issue?
About 2016 or so, admissions to pharmacy school peaked. Everything then is on a four-year delay. Our attrition is somewhat regulated by our accreditors; they want us to make sure we get the right students in the right seats and make sure we are invested in student success so they graduate. It’s not unusual for schools of pharmacy to have 90-plus percent of incoming classes graduating. So, 2019, the peak in graduations occurred, and that was pre-pandemic. And the pandemic did a lot that our profession had been trying to do for years. It really educated the lay public on what does a pharmacist really do. We get out and see patients and talk to patients about their medications. We look out for medication safety in terms of drug interactions, wrong dosing, wrong drug. Obviously, the public found out what we did in a big sense and have kind of overwhelmed that aspect of pharmacy. You saw, I think it was this fall up in Kansas City, some pharmacists walking out. That’s an illustration of the work environment that is in the commercial community pharmacy, Walgreens, CVS. Those are not good places to be introduced to pharmacy because of the work environment, the stress and the staffing issues. My message to young adults is there are more places to be a pharmacist than just the corporate community stores or even hospitals. To me, that’s the beauty of pharmacy.

Are the changes within the industry, in terms of more of the locally based pharmacies closing and moving more to that commercial retail model, reducing some opportunities?
The independent community pharmacy is under some stress, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. Sometimes the corporate pharmacies have moved into small, rural communities. There definitely is a challenge there in terms of the job market. The one thing that I push back on when people are like, “Oh, well, there’s not enough jobs,” your statistics show that that’s not true. Just about 18 months ago when I looked at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, they were forecasting from 2022 to 2032 to have a 0% growth in pharmacy. They are now projecting a 3% growth. There’s already a shortage. We will be graduating probably less than 10,000 students across the country for the first time since the 1990s by next year. There are plenty of jobs and there’s plenty other emerging practice settings where I think that it’s a great time to get into pharmacy.

What makes you most excited about the profession today?
The excitement for me is seeing the numbers come back for enrollments, and they will. When you’re in academia as long as I’ve been, you see trends and cycles. The other thing is that medicine and the technology surrounding health care is changing at light speed. The opportunities that are going to be there for pharmacists are just mind-blowing. Just a few years ago, the mere perception of going into a pharmacy and getting a test for an infection was super high level. Now, we do it at home. Being able to administer those kind of tests or interpret them, the ambulatory care setting or the clinic setting that pharmacists work one-on-one with patients, I just think it’s an exciting time for pharmacy. Springfield and the surrounding community have been wonderful for us. We collaborate heavily with MSU, but other educational institutions here in Springfield have been marvelous for us. (Ozarks Technical Community College) basically took our prerequisites and created a degree pathway for their students. We recently, the last two years, have gotten into getting our students to vaccinate the MSU community for influenza. President [Clif] Smart and his team have really made it seamless for us to exist here.