«The reductions in opening hours due to lack of staff are no longer isolated cases, but are actually increasing. And the numbers on new students enrolled in pharmacy faculties cast an alarming shadow over the near future. The great efforts made to relaunch the local pharmacy, providing it with new services and a more organic integration with the NHS, risk being wasted due to the progressive lack of the professional raw materials it needs to function and grow.” This is what was highlighted by Luca Pieri, president of Assofarm, on the sidelines of the Federal Council meeting held on 8 May 2024.
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Measures that boost the profitability of municipal pharmacies
Faced with this situation, the world of Italian municipal pharmacies imagines at least three concrete ways forward. The first is certainly the increase in the salary levels of employed pharmacists, the element that more than any other could push young people to imagine their professional future in private and public pharmacies. «An objective – continues Pieri – can only be achieved with measures that relaunch the profitability of our companies, first of all the service pharmacy».
Corporate welfare mechanisms for tangible benefits
In parallel to this, as already stated in other places, municipal pharmacies intend to develop corporate welfare mechanisms that offer tangible benefits parallel to the salary and can improve the quality of life of their employees. A third solution could also come from the introduction of the Pharmacist’s Assistant, a figure already tested in other European countries and which would be trained through a short degree. This is a professional who would carry out distribution, logistics and administrative functions, obviously leaving the pharmacist to supervise the dispensing of the drug and the direct consultancy relationship with the patient. «We must therefore act on at least two strategic fronts: on the one hand we must relieve the pharmacist of tasks that even a suitably trained technician can do, and on the other we must create more pharmacists. The latter result can only be achieved if the career as an employed pharmacist is a professionally interesting and economically rewarding job.”
