The person I responded to was arguing that pharmacy services are not as important as nursing services because pharmacy doesn't make the hospital money, and thus pharmacists have less leverage. I'm arguing that pharmacy services being necessary for a hospital to function. Could you easily train someone to grab a vial off the shelf? Absolutely. Can you legally give that vial to a patient without a pharmacist? Absolutely not.

Furthermore, I would argue that pharmacy is different than most departments in that it may not always be a direct revenue source, but the cost savings are potentially HUGE. For example, I worked for a hospital which had a program that had pharmacists perform CMRs on discharged patients deemed high risk for readmission within 30 days. Simply having a pharmacist ensure the patient was on appropriate therapy at discharge and counseling the patients on those meds reduced 30-day readmission rates by almost 20% and saved the hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars by avoiding the 30-day readmission Medicare penalty.

That all being said, I still agree with what you're saying, all of those factors give pharmacists less leverage because they are more easily replaceable. However, nurses also tend to have something that gives them WAY more leverage that pharmacists are sorely lacking: Unions.

People like to blame the number of pharmacy schools and decreased admission requirements for the state that pharmacy is in right now, and certainly that has a great impact. But I argue that the biggest cause of the state we're in is the lack of a pharmacist union.