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A word from our MD

The 2011 Pharmacy Barometer

The 2011 Pharmacy Barometer highlighted a shortage of pharmacists – how is the problem to be solved?

SIFO, a Swedish market research organisation, has recently completed the first ever Pharmacy Barometer. The survey, which was commissioned by PharmaRelations, is aimed at the new pharmacy labour market and will be performed annually in the future. Representatives from all of the pharmacy companies active in Sweden took part in the survey. 

The 2011 Pharmacy Barometer showed that there is already a shortage of pharmacists, a shortage which is expected to grow over the next few years. The problem is greater in some regions than others, with Norrland, Skåne, Värmland and Blekinge being especially affected. It is least apparent in the larger metropolitan areas.

At PharmaRelations we want to support companies working in the sector and to effectively help them reduce staff shortages. Measures to encourage young people to train as drug dispensers and pharmaceutical chemists are needed and universities and politicians should consider increasing the number of students these educational programmes can accept.

We also believe it is more cost-effective for companies to hire temporary staff than to spend time finding temps themselves and/or building their own internal pool of staff. We must get better at explaining the advantages of contract staffing, after all the system works well in many other sectors.

The pharmacy sector is very new and hasn’t settled yet, no-one has known quite what would happen following re-regulation. What we do know is that over 200 new pharmacies have opened in the past 2 years, and that many more are planned. It will, however, be difficult to fulfill these plans if the different players in the pharmacy sector don’t all work together to create a more effective labour market. We would very much like to enter into a dialogue with all those involved, to discuss how we, as a staffing company, can help.

Welcome to PharmaRelations – your partner in staffing solutions within Life Science!