Job matching in pharmacy labor markets: A study in four states

Purpose. Reports from various pharmacy labor market sectors suggest that th e United States may be experiencing a shortage of pharmacists. To guide pol icy making and planning with respect to this shortage it is necessary to de velop a better understanding of the process by which pharmacists choose job s. Using the economic theory of job matching, this study sought to understa nd how (a) attributes of the practice setting, (b) characteristics of pharm acists. and (c) regional and urbanization variables are associated with pha rmacy practice setting choices. Methods. A secondary database containing information about employment chara cteristics and work histories of 541 pharmacists in four states was used. T he data were augmented with information on the relative number of employmen t opportunities in each of three practice settings (large: chain, instituti onal, and independent) in the year the respondent's most recent employment change occurred. Practice setting choices were modeled using multinomial co nditional logit regression. Results. A total of 477 pharmacists represented in the database met the inc lusion criteria for the study. Multivariate analyses showed that the impact of search costs and wage differentials varied with the practice setting ch osen. Pharmacists choosing independent settings over large chain settings w ere more likely to be white and to have worked in an independent setting in their prior job. Pharmacists living in Oregon were less likely to choose i nstitutional settings compared to those living in Massachusetts, whereas th ose living in areas with populations greater than 50,000 were more likely t o choose institutional settings. Conclusions. Pharmacist job matching appears to be a complex process in whi ch diverse factors interact to produce a final match. Our results suggest t hat the: pharmacy labor market may actually be composed of two distinct lab or markets: an ambulatory market and an institutional market.