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FEATURE-U.S. drugstores look beyond borders for pharmacists
Tuesday July 3, 10:36 am Eastern Time
By Ellis Mnyandu
NEW YORK, July 3 (Reuters) - Facing rapid growth in the use of prescription drugs, the United States may soon have to open its doors to pharmacists from abroad, in the same way software programmers poured in at the height of the Internet boom.
Obtaining working visas for pharmacists from countries such as South Africa and India would help the drug retailers to fill thousands of vacancies. It would allow them to keep pace with the rising demands of an aging population and a surge in the amount of new drugs hitting the U.S. market, analysts and industry experts said.
According to the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (NACDS), four out every five patients who visit a doctor in the United States. leave with a prescription. The nation's prescription drug sales rose to about $132 billion last year from $121 billion in 1999, and are expected to rise a further 75 percent in the next five years.
"The pharmacist shortage is the biggest pain for the U.S. pharmacy industry right now," said Steve Croke, president of Colorado-based PharmacyChoice.com, one of the nation's leading pharmacist recruiting agencies.
"The only choice available to the industry is to get people from abroad. Closing down pharmacies could be too costly for the industry," he said."
NACDS says unfilled full-time and part-time pharmacists positions in the United States more than doubled to 6,920 in February 2000 from two years earlier.
The shortage, which has now surpassed 7,000 according to some industry experts, is equal to almost 7 percent of the 106,000 pharmacists employed at U.S. drug stores and the effects of the staffing shortage are being felt.
Last week CVS Corp. (NYSE:CVS - news) -- the No. 2 U.S. drugstore chain behind Walgreen Co. (NYSE:WAG - news) -- said some of its pharmacies have had to start shutting down earlier than normal and its sales were being hurt by the pharmacist shortage and the resulting deteriorating service it was offering customers.
CVS has cut its profit outlook for the second quarter and for the current year, citing the impact of the shortage as one of the reasons.
CUMBERSOME PROCESS
Croke said that while the drug retailing industry already used some foreign-trained pharmacists, employers were still not looking beyond the frontiers as aggressively as software firms did in the 1990s to sustain the boom in the high-tech economy.
Part of their problem, he said, was the often cumbersome process of hiring a foreign-trained pharmacist. It can take up to 18 months and about three tests before employers can obtain an H-1B work permit visa, which allows skilled foreign workers to be employed in the United States for up to six years.
The United States is currently allowing 195,000 skilled foreign workers to enter the country for work every year through H-1B visas, with many of these last year going to software programmers and workers with other computer skills, particularly from India.
However, the bursting of the Internet bubble has forced some of them to return home as their U.S. employers close down or cut staff.
Eyleen Schmidt, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), said medical and pharmacist-related jobs took up about 2 percent of all the H-1B visas issued every year. She declined to say whether there had been a recent surge in applications on behalf of foreign pharmacists.
To try to encourage the recruitment of foreign pharmacists and make the process less daunting, Croke said he is setting up an online recruiting tool to help link employers with prospective candidates from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Nigeria, and the Philippines, as well as parts of Western Europe and the former Soviet Union.
He said the site, which goes live in less than two weeks, would help make it easier for foreign pharmacists to understand what the INS and pharmacy licensing authorities require before they can start work in the United States.
FOREIGN ROUTE
Croke said CVS is set to evaluate the new recruiting tool.
"The other big benefit of this tool we've developed is that it will give employers access to our international database of resumes and other resources to help ease the process of hiring someone from abroad," he said.
Analysts said the foreign route made sense.
"Getting people from abroad is not a bad option," said Stephen Chick, an analyst at J.P. Morgan
Still, Chick said the costs of importing staff, in terms of relocation, travel and housing expenses, might more than offset the revenue gained by being fully staffed.
The U.S. pharmacist shortage is partly the result of increased training mandated by schools and accreditation authorities.
Pharmacists in the United States have historically been required to study for a period of five years, including one year of on-the-job work. But in an an apparent effort to prepare the U.S. drug retailing industry for new drug therapies, the period of study has been extended to a minimum of six years for a Doctor of Pharmacy degree.
While the 82 U.S. pharmacy schools and universities have phased in the new requirements, they have led to a hiccup in the production of freshly minted pharmacists.
The loss of trained pharmacists to higher paying opportunities outside the drugstore sector, such as at biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, has also contributed to the shortage.
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