Pharmacy on the Farm

There is an acute shortage of pharmacists in Australia, particularly in rural and remote areas. The Victorian College of Pharmacy at Monash University is investigating why this shortage exists and is encouraging pharmacy graduates to work in regional areas. PENNY FANNIN reports.

In just over a year of working in a country Victorian pharmacy, Monash graduate Jit Chong has seen customers with snake bites, eye injuries from welding equipment and a litany of allergies.

It is just the sort of varied experience Mr Chong, who graduated in 2001, was looking for when he joined the Wangaratta pharmacy in February last year.

Mr Chong says a rural placement in the town of Albury in the third year of his pharmacy degree inspired him to take the job in Wangaratta.

“My main reason for coming up here was to get a taste of what a country practice was like. I was attracted by the environment and the opportunity to learn so much in just one pharmacy,” he says.

The pharmacy where Mr Chong works is a large and busy practice that focuses on educating the public about their medications while also servicing the oncology department of a local private hospital and filling the scripts for the residents of several nursing homes.

“There are no bulk-billing doctors around, so the locals often seek a pharmacist’s opinion before going to the doctor,” Mr Chong says. “The community places a lot of trust in us as pharmacists, and there is a real need for pharmacists in country areas.”

Professor Colin Chapman, dean of Monash’s Victorian College of Pharmacy, says hospital and community pharmacies nationally have been experiencing a shortage of pharmacists for some years.

“The shortage is especially acute in rural and remote areas, which struggle to attract graduates,” Professor Chapman says. “As a result, rural hospital and community pharmacies are under-resourced, and their pharmacists are overworked and under a great strain to serve their communities.”

There has been a well-documented trend away from rural practice to urban areas across the health sector. Several studies involving doctors, nurses and physiotherapists have attempted to understand the issues involved, but there is scant information on why pharmacists are reluctant to take up rural positions.

To address this gap in knowledge, the Victorian College of Pharmacy has begun a graduate tracking project. The three-pronged project aims to find out why pharmacy graduates in the past have chosen to work in rural areas, to what extent the college’s rural student selection scheme has been successful in producing graduates who return to work in rural areas and what impact the compulsory rural placements in the pharmacy course have had on subsequent employment in rural areas.

The tracking project is the most comprehensive workforce study relating to the rural pharmacy workforce ever attempted in Australia and is being funded over three years by the Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s Rural and Remote Pharmacy Workforce Development Program.

“The data gathered by the project will be used to directly influence programs that help promote rural pharmacy, develop pharmacist re-entry initiatives and identify the factors that impact on pharmacy graduates’ desire to practise in a rural area,” Professor Chapman says.

The Victorian College of Pharmacy has already implemented many initiatives to better service regional areas. These include:

• a rural student selection scheme that allows five to 10 students who have completed their secondary education in regional towns but who failed to gain entry to the pharmacy course on ENTER alone, to take up a HECS place in the pharmacy course;
• students in the third or fourth year of their pharmacy course undertaking a compulsory three-week placement in a regional area;
• a compulsory component on veterinary pharmacy that covers zoonoses (diseases that are communicable to man from animals), common diseases of domesticated pets and farm animals and veterinary dose forms, all of which are highly relevant to pharmacists practising in regional areas.

Professor Chapman says there is anecdotal evidence to suggest these initiatives have encouraged students to practise in rural areas but that the tracking study will provide more reliable data.

“We hope this project will help direct future national strategies to encourage pharmacists back to pharmacy and to rural and remote areas,” he says. “This is not a short-term solution and the benefits will not be felt quickly. The trend of health professionals away from the bush is a complex issue and it’s important that it be addressed.”

Action: For more information on rural training offered by the Victorian College of Pharmacy, visit http://www.vcp.monash.edu.au/rural/. For information on the graduate tracking project, contact Mr Geoff Dumayne at geoffdumayne@yahoo.com.au.