In response to a growing pharmacy technician shortage and oncology care demands, Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., developed and launched an in-house training program to help grow its pharmacy technician workforce.
Since its inception in 2021, the program has produced skilled professionals in one of the most specialized areas in healthcare: chemotherapy admixture.
Becker’s spoke to Courtney Ullrich, PharmD, Moffitt’s inpatient pharmacy manager, and Kenneth Komorny, PharmD, the organization’s chief pharmacy officer, about how the training program is helping address critical pharmacy technician shortage gaps.
Addressing a widening gap
At the heart of the program is a practical solution to a statewide and national shortage of pharmacy technicians.
“Nationwide, of course, there’s a shortage of pharmacy technicians, but this is especially prominent in Florida,” Dr. Komorny said. “There was a study that demonstrated that Florida was one of the worst states in the country with respect to the number of licensed pharmacy techs relative to the number of open positions.”
The gap is even more challenging for Moffitt, where pharmacy technicians need to have skills rarely taught in traditional community pharmacy settings.
“We seek a specialized subset of techs that have experience with chemo preparation,” he said.
A pandemic-era catalyst
The COVID-19 pandemic also pushed Moffitt Cancer Center to reimagine its workforce pipeline.
“COVID changed the landscape of healthcare and careers in general,” Dr. Ullrich said. “It impacted our recruitment, both directly and in trying to maintain our feeder systems with the local technician schools, seeing competition with other healthcare systems as well.”
With traditional hiring routes being disrupted, Moffitt began to see applicants who had only community pharmacy experience or none at all. However, Dr. Ullrich emphasized that these individuals brought strong soft skills, critical thinking and a desire for purposeful work.
“In order to flex up the applicant pool, we realized that by just adding a couple extra months of training, we were able to create highly skilled technicians who had zero pharmacy experience prior, but who have excellent experience in other industries,” she said.
The program blueprint
The program officially enrolled its first trainee in September 2021 and since then, 13 trainees have entered the program, 11 have graduated and 11 have been retained, including one trainee on track to graduate in September.
“Our goal is to create really well-rounded technicians,” Dr. Ullrich said. “We’re really focused on creating quality technicians, and not necessarily driving in mass or high quantities of technician trainees.”
The training is extensive, typically spanning six months, and progresses gradually from medication delivery and dispensing to sterile compounding and chemotherapy admixture.
Career growth from within
Beyond pharmacy technician staffing needs, the program creates a path for career growth. Several graduates had no prior pharmacy background but have been able to grow within Moffitt.
“They’re very motivated,” Dr. Ullrich said. “They have excellent critical thinking skills and are really good at integrating with the team, but they just needed that foot in the door in order to have a more fulfilling career as a pharmacy technician.”
Part of the program’s success, she added, is ensuring quality training without overburdening existing staff. The program is set up as having rolling admissions with no fixed start dates, and trainees are trained to operate across inpatient and outpatient care settings with the ability to step into any technician role across Moffit’s system.
A model for other systems?
Dr. Ullrich said she believes this model is replicable and is gaining traction across Florida and beyond.
“I think it is becoming the model for healthcare systems,” she said. “We’re not unique in the fact that we have an on the job training program here in Florida, and especially those organizations that have the bandwidth to train and are willing to invest there in the resources for that training. What makes us unique, however, is that we’re really committed to providing them the training so that they can gain the skills needed to progress all the way through the chemotherapy admixture training.”
