Pharmacy need growing in LV

The need for pharmacists is growing with the Las Vegas Valley's population, but state officials fear the nation's pharmacy schools won't be able to keep up with the demand in the next decade.

Making matters worse are two factors: the number of medications that doctors can prescribe has doubled in the past 10 years and the population is maturing to an age that requires more medicines, Keith Macdonald, Nevada State Pharmacy Board executive director, said.

It's a formula for a shortage that could become a serious problem, Macdonald said -- a formula the pharmacy board hopes to change by attracting a pharmacy school to open a Las Vegas campus.

A shortage could lead to overworked, fatigued pharmacists making mistakes, a lowering of patient-care standards and a lack of the kind of one-on-one attention Nevadans are accustomed to, he said.

"The number of graduates is virtually flat," Macdonald said. "There might be 6 or 10 percent more graduates in 2005 while the number of prescriptions filled nationwide is estimated to go from 2 billion in 1999 to 4.8 billion or 5 billion in 2005."

Macdonald said about 90 pharmacists are hired in Nevada each year, 75 to 80 percent of in Las Vegas, but there are 135 new jobs to fill.

This need may help a California university decide that Las Vegas is a good location for its next pharmacy school campus.

Officials of Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, Calif., hope to open in the fall of 2002 with 75 students.

The school's Board of Trustees will vote Dec. 11 whether to open a Las Vegas campus, Dr. Carl Trinca, acting dean of the university's Pomona campus, said. If the board approves the plan, Western University would open the first postgraduate pharmacy program in Nevada, Trinca said.

"Chain drug stores that we have been working with indicate that 110 new pharmacists are needed in Nevada each year. So far, Nevada has had to import that work force," Trinca said. A new flow of pharmacists would help, but Macdonald says technology might provide some relief as well.

Last month Sunrise Hospital became the first health care facility in Nevada to employ ROBOT-Rx, a robotic device designed to automate storage, dispensing, restocking and crediting of medication dosage.

"One of the most tedious jobs a pharmacist has is plucking the various medicines off the shelves," Dr. Bill Martin, director of pharmacy services and materials management for Sunrise Hospital, said. "With the introduction of ROBOT-Rx our pharmacists will be able to do the more research-oriented analysis they trained several years for."

Martin said the typical human error rate in any hospital is one in 2,500, while the robot's error rate is one in 10 million.

"Automated dispensing has the ability to reduce prescription error," MacDonald agreed.

Area Rite Aid pharmacies have employed a smaller automated dispensing system called RapidScript for the past year in Las Vegas, Rite Aid spokeswoman Jody Cook said.

RapidScript handles each Rite Aid pharmacy's 200 most popular drugs, counting the medication with a laser eye, depositing it into a vial and labeling the vial, she said.

RapidScript has three built-in safety checks and a fourth check is done by the pharmacist before the vial is capped. RapidScript is not designed to reduce the number of pharmacists needed in each store, but to free up the pharmacists' time.

"RapidScript is used as a tool so pharmacists can spend more time with consumers," she said.

Such technological advances and the possibility of more graduating pharmacists will certainly help to decrease the number of medication-caused deaths, but some simpler measurers can also be taken, Dr. Max Ray, a local physician, said.

He said a greater level of communication between health care professionals is needed.

"When questions arise we can't always get in touch with each other," he said.

Ray said another way to decrease the number of problems is for pharmacists to begin to view their customers as patients.

"When a pharmacist sees his customers as patients is when greater levels of communication are reached," he said.

Pharmacists are available to consumers to answer questions and hear concerns about prescriptions; however, Ray said many people do not realize this.

Perhaps the simplest change would be for doctors to write the reason for the medication on the prescription, Ray said.

This would be a safety check, allowing pharmacists to make sure the medication they are dispensing is the right remedy for the diagnosis, allowing the pharmacist to contact the doctor if there is a question.

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