Aiming to encourage young people to consider careers in pharmacy, CVS Corp. said last week that it will expand an internship program for disadvantaged teens to reach 1 million inner-city and rural youth and spend as much as $4 million on wages alone by 2010.
CVS launched its Pathways to Pharmacy program in 2000, and it’s grown to serve nearly 6,000 high school students in almost 40 cities. But it’s only going national – and coming to Rhode Island – this year, in a partnership with America’s Promise – The Alliance for Youth.
The company kicked off the initiative with an event Wednesday at The Met School that included a workshop with author Stedman Graham (Oprah Winfrey’s partner) and an appearance by Alma Powell, chairwoman of America’s Promise.
“CVS/pharmacy’s Pathways to Pharmacy program coincides seamlessly with our larger purpose of mobilizing Americans to make young people an urgent national priority,” Powell said in a statement.
Along with providing opportunities for disadvantaged kids, CVS’ program is designed to address a national shortage of pharmacists documented in a 2000 report by the Health Resources and Services Administration’s National Center for Health Workforce Information and Analysis. The agency found a sharp increase in the demand for pharmacy services and a simultaneous decline in pharmacy school applications.
Since then, pharmacy schools have reported an increase in applications, and last year, the University of Rhode Island’s College of Pharmacy had 1,100 applications for only 90 seats. But drugstores are still having a hard time filling pharmacist jobs.
According to the Pharmacy Manpower Project Inc., which collects, analyzes and distributes data on the supply of licensed pharmacists in the United States, 98.6 percent of U.S. residents live in states where filling pharmacist positions is “at least moderately difficult.”
“There’s a big unmet need for pharmacists,” said Joan Lausier, professor of pharmaceutics and associate dean of the College of Pharmacy at URI. “There’s a national shortage, and they don’t expect that to go away.”
CVS’ Pathways to Pharmacy program, which began in Harlem and Washington, D.C., provides eight-week paid internships for high school students to explore pharmacy as a career option. It began with six students and last summer served 1,800. For this summer, the goal is to provide internships for 2,000 students, including some from the Met.
To identify good candidates, CVS works with teachers to pick students with an aptitude for math and science, then invites the students and their parents to an orientation session.
Stephen Wing, director of government programs for CVS, said the students selected aren’t always at the top of their class, and “they might even be failing, but if a teacher thinks that a student could be successful in this program, we want to talk to that student.”
The program requires students to spend three weeks at a local college’s school of pharmacy and then five weeks working in a CVS store. The college time gives them a taste of chemistry and other aspects of pharmacy, while the store experience teaches them customer service skills and how to help customers who may be sick or have a sick loved one.
From there, participants can work their way into a support person position – and, CVS hopes, if they go on to study pharmacy, may one day work as pharmacists.
About half the interns stay with CVS, Wing said. That would allow them to take prescriptions, answer phones and help customers with over-the-counter medicines. During this time they are mentored by the manager and the pharmacist.
“If 50 percent do, and there are 1,800 interns, that’s 900 kids that may go to pharmacy school,” Wing said.
“We have already had kids that went through the program and have graduated from pharmacy school and have come back.”
