UNC-Chapel Hill has received the blessing of the UNC system's governing board to create a satellite pharmacy program in Asheville.
The program will link with UNC-Asheville and Mission Hospital with the aim of increasing the pool of pharmacists in the western end of the state.
It did not come easy.
The idea was vetted this week by UNC system President Erskine Bowles and then by a committee of the UNC system's Board of Governors. Both Bowles and that committee were selecting between the UNC-CH proposal and a larger, more ambitious plan to build a new pharmacy school at UNC Greensboro.
In opting for the UNC-CH plan, UNC-system officials put a stop to UNCG's initiative.
A Thursday meeting of the UNC system's planning committee was occasionally contentious. At one point, UNCG Chancellor Linda Brady and Provost David Perrin argued they were falling victim to a technicality. They only wanted permission to continue planning a pharmacy school, a far cry from actually asking for the UNC system to establish one.
But Bowles disagreed, saying he'd told the UNCG contingent they had one shot to make their best sales pitch.
"You had plenty of opportunity to put your best shot forward," Bowles said.
A day later, committee chairman Marshall Pitts referred to the pharmacy meeting as a "smackdown."
UNCG officials have pushed hard for a new pharmacy school, saying it would be a shot in the arm to the economic development climate of the Triad, creating hundreds of jobs there.
Meanwhile, UNC-CH officials presented a smaller, far less expensive proposal patterned after a successful satellite venture already in place linking the Chapel Hill campus with Elizabeth City State University using distance education.
A key issue is demand for pharmacists. While it has long been assumed that North Carolina needs more pharmacists, that appears no longer true aside from in rural areas of the state that are usually under-served. A recent report by a UNC-CH health services research institute found
that the state no longer has a shortage except in some rural areas.
Asheville is one of those regions, a justification for the UNC-CH program there, officials said.
Here's another way to look at the supply and demand issue. Until recently, new pharmacy school graduates had their pick of high-paying jobs, particularly at chain and other retail drugstores. Some paid sizable signing bonuses.
But no longer. The job market has tightened considerably.
In 2008, 90 percent of the graduating class had accepted positions by May 1, according to surveys.
In 2009, that number dropped to 75 percent, according to David Etchison with the UNC-CH pharmacy school.
Comments
This is crap reporting
Fri, 04/09/2010 - 22:56 — nclawkidIf you're going to write like you're an authority on a subject, you should do more than just skim the surface.
Contention 1: Asheville is rural and needs more pharmacists
Carolina's own study disproves this. In the appendix to the recommendation to the edcuation committee (titled "Tab 7" found at https://www.northcarolina.edu/bog/index.php), Buncombe County is not listed as being a "persistent health professional shortage."
Further, Table 2 in the same appendix shows that there are more pharmacists per capita in the Mountain region than there are in Greensboro. The mountains region had 406 pharmacists for a population of 714,325 people. That's 0.0568 %. Greensboro only had 519 pharmacists for a population of 1,088,392. That's 0.0476 %. More people...less pharmacists, which explains why Greensboro pharmacists were filling 15.5 prescriptions per hour compared to only 11.3 prescriptions per hour in the mountains region. The state average was 13.2 prescriptions per hour. Greensboro higher than the state average. Asheville lower than the state average.
So let me get this straight. Asheville has more pharmacists per capita and they're filling less prescriptions and yet Carolina (and apparently the News & Observer) wants us to believe that the Asheville region's lack of pharmacists necessitated the UNC program over UNCG?
Then, throw in the fact that Wingate University plans to establish its own program in Asheville to graduate 70 or more pharmacy students a year. That, together with UNC's plan, would nearly equal the number of students that graduate in Chapel Hill each year.
Oh, and there's that pesky little admission by UNC itself that Asheville lacks the resources to support both programs. It's there on page 7 of the recommendation. "The visiting team was advised as we were finalizing this report of the recently announced
commitment by Wingate University to establish a program in Asheville/Hendersonville which will impact this consideration. It is unlikely that both an expanded UNC‐CH program and a Wingate program are needed and would have sufficient clinical sites for training."
And I don't see Wingate flinching. So does this mean UNC is going to graduating inferior students from this satellite campus, since by its own admission, they're aren't enough training resources?
Contention 2: UNCG's program would have cost more
Yes. Annual expenses would have cost more. But UNCG's program would have also graduated double the number of students. Plus Greensboro foundations and businesses were offering to cover the startup costs and building costs according to your own news article. That would have been a contribution of $60 million+. And that's lowballing it. Offers like that don't just happen everyday.
AND ON AND ON AND ON....
This recommendation and the Board's decision are rife with factual inaccuracies that don't support their story.
Chapel Hill didn't want to give up its status as the ONLY public pharmacy school in North Carolina. And neither Eriskine Bowles nor the Board were big enough to stand up to Carolina. So they couched their story in lies about capital costs and pharmacy shortages and on and on.
When will leaders in this state finally realize that all roads don't run through Chapel Hill, no matter how they try. The 16 other constituent campuses graduate more students than Chapel Hill. But you wouldn't know it by looking at the lopsided influence that Carolina still curries with the good 'ol boys.