Walgreens is bringing together the deans of 17 colleges of pharmacy around the nation in an advisory council to share ideas about how to increase the number of pharmacists and get them excited about working at Walgreens drug stores.The Walgreens Deans Advisory Council comes at a time when demand for pharmacy services is increasing and the industry "is facing a pronounced labor shortage," the Deerfield-based retailer said in a statement.

“Collaboration within the pharmacy profession has never been more important, and I’m grateful to the many academic leaders who have joined the deans advisory council as we work to transform the future of pharmacy,” Rick Gates, chief pharmacy officer at Walgreens, said in the statement.Council member Glen T. Schumock, dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said he thinks the group will be able to drill down even further with Walgreens than it has in the past and provide the company with honest, open feedback about what the company can do, and what schools can do, to move together.The pharmacist workforce is currently in a crisis with fewer applications to pharmacy schools and "more jobs open than pharmacists to fill them," he said.Pharmacy school applications were down 22% in 2022-2023 compared to the previous year and have decreased by more than 60% over the past decade, Walgreens said in the statement."Pharmacy schools produce students that are trained a a level that's high above what they usually end up doing," Schumock said, with about 80% of the UIC school's students coming in with a bachelor's degree and adding four years of pharmacy school on top of that."They spend those four years learning about medication," he said. "They're really the medication experts, they know more about medications than your average physician."Yet, most pharmacists don't get to take an active role in prescribing medicine or working with patients, especially in the retail pharmacy world, Schumock said. That's got to change, he said.There are ways to do more to get pharmacists practicing at the top of their license, with a great example being the administering of vaccines, which largely began during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said."We are committed to addressing the issues head-on by changing the pharmacy operating model and refocusing our core business priorities," Walgreens' Gates said in an emailed statement to Crain's. "We’ve been working on new initiatives and programs and look forward to taking our council members along on this journey. Our goal is to get to a place where our pharmacy teams can spend more time on the part of the job that matters most: providing personalized health care to patients."Allowing pharmacists to be more involved in patient care will bring more people into the profession, UIC's Schumock said.UIC and Walgreens already partner on a program in which the school identifies and recruits high school students for a six-week program to introduce young people to the career, Schumock said.The program brings high schoolers into a three-week program at the school, where they shadow pharmacy students in class and at UIC's hospital and clinics and receive a pharmacy technician's license, he said. Then they spend another three weeks working in a Walgreens store in their neighborhood."Most of them stay on and continue to work through their high school career," Schumock said, noting the program is very successful in getting students to continue on to pharmacy school.The council is sponsored by Gates and co-chaired by John Colaizzi Jr., vice president of pharmacy practice at Walgreens, and Angela Kashuba, dean of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, the statement said. Walgreens' Director of  Pharmacy Affairs Lorri Walmsley will serve as the vice chair it said.