To help Health New Zealand accurately reflect the workforce pressures community pharmacy is experiencing, we ran a workforce survey in April 2024. This survey collected data on the number of pharmacists, interns, pharmacy accuracy checking technicians (PACTs), technicians, and retail staff employed, and the number of vacancies.
The 2024 Health Workforce Plan has included some information from our survey, acknowledging us for this plus our separate analysis around declining student enrolment numbers in the Bachelor of Pharmacy programme across Auckland and Otago.
The plan shows estimates of current full-time-equivalent shortages across the health sector of around 1,000 pharmacists and 620 pharmacy technicians (including PACTs), plus a 20% decline in the average number of annual pharmacy school student enrolments over the last three years. There is also an estimated need for an additional 570 full-time-equivalent pharmacists by 2033 on top of the current pipeline.
The specific actions included in this year’s plan to help address pharmacy workforce pressures are:
- Match tertiary training capacity to future need – to outline required tertiary training growth to meet demand by 2035.
- Attract students to health careers by launching a national attraction campaign to get students interested in health careers.
- Improve graduate transitions – establish 20 additional entry to practice roles for allied professionals, with a focus on innovative care settings.
While we are encouraged to see an improved line of sight to our real workforce pressures and some initial planned actions that were previously missing, we do not consider these actions sufficient to effectively deal with the full extent of our current shortages and future needs.
Accordingly, we will work during 2025 with key leaders across community pharmacy to develop a comprehensive workforce plan for our sector. We continue to see community pharmacy has a vital and growing role to perform in primary and community healthcare and urgently requires a significantly increased workforce capacity.