From APC’s President

The Great Resignation

About a year ago, a friend of mine asked me how I know when it’s time to hire another technician.

I responded that we are ALWAYS hiring. If we find a talented professional who fits into our culture, we do our best to bring them on. Almost certainly a vacancy will open in the next few months and voila, the hire is justified.

COVID has changed life forever. Many people, including pharmacists, technicians and support personnel have chosen to give up their careers during the pandemic in favor of other ones or better “work/life balance” (meaning no work and lots of “life”). As hard as we try to recruit and retain people, it seems like an impossible task.

As a result, we have had to change the way we conduct business. We’ve had to shorten our hours, reduce our services, and significantly increase wages without a corresponding increase in reimbursement.

How can we find qualified candidates to work in our pharmacies? Many of us use Indeed, ZipRecuiter, LinkedIn Jobs and their ilk, but these don’t work very well: most of the candidates we get are either not qualified or not interested.

I was excited to learn this week that APC is launching a career center. We partnered with Nayler to develop a nationwide platform that connects qualified, interested professionals with your available positions. There are already 503 pharmacy-specific jobs posted on this site. If you have openings to fill, I hope you take the smarter, easier path and post them on APC’s Career Center.

• • •

David Miller is APC’s president and the managing co-owner of Keystone Compounding Pharmacy in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can reach him at drdave@keystonepharm.com.

This week

APC’s Career Center:

Your new recruiting solution

APC has launched a career website to help professionals and compounding pharmacies and facilities find each other quicker and easier.

For employers

We invite you to connect with our network of elite compounding professionals through our state-of-the-art recruitment platform. 

Commercial job boards such as LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter cannot provide this level of targeted exposure. Employment advertising specialists are on hand to help you:

• Develop strategic recruitment campaigns to place your employment brand in front of our elite talent pool
• Build custom media packages for diversified exposure
• Expedite real-time ads to help you get critical positions filled

EMPLOYER Quick links:

• Rates page
• Employer home page
• Employer Login 

For compounding pharmacy professionals looking for their

next opportunity

APC’s Career Center provides access to the employers, job opportunities and job-hunting resources. Visit the Career Center links below to browse openings, upload your resume and set up job alerts. 

JOB SEEKER Quick links:

• Search jobs
• Job Seeker Home Page
• Job Seeker Login

APC Pharmacy/Facility Members (PFMs) are entitled to exceptional value opportunities through several hand-picked affinity service providers.

We’re pleased to introduce our newest one: Rx Advisors.

Rx Advisors is a full-service accounting and tax firm specializing in independent pharmacies, with specific expertise in compounding pharmacies.

Pharmacy/Facility Members only are eligible to receive a 20% discount on income tax, bookkeeping, payroll, and business advisory services.

Interested in learning more or taking advantage of RxAdvisor’s free income tax review. Well, first you have to become a PFM. If you’ve already made that smart move, contact Rx Advisors’ Curtis Cole at curtis@fleming-advisors.com or 855.877.9807.

Here at APC, we do a lot with a little: we’re a small organization and our resources aren’t bottomless. But we’re scrappy, and when we tackle an issue, the results are usually good for your compounding practice. 

Case in point, here are two recent developments:

• We launched a portal to help our members aggregate patient-reported outcomes to prove to FDA that compounded medications are benefitting millions of patients.
• Via our Legal Action Fund, we filed two recent amicus briefs in court cases: one defending your right to compound methylcobalamin, and the other addressing ambiguity in FDA’s insanitary conditions guidance. 

We are working on plenty of other stuff, too. The salient point is that none of these things happen without funding—and right now, APC is running low on funds to support our advocacy work. 

APC’s OneFund is how we pay for our advocacy work. Right now—almost halfway into the year—OneFund has only raised 15% of its 2022 funding goal. That means our ability to keep doing what we’re doing is at risk.

If you believe what we’re doing benefits your patients or your profession or the pharmacy or facility you work for—please make a meaningful contribution to OneFund today.

Save these dates

June 9: CompPAC Virtual Town Hall with Chris Schiller

June 21–22: Informa Connect’s Compounding Pharmacy Compliance, College Park, MD

June 23: An APC Webinar, 503A Compounding for Shortages – What Can (and Can’t) You Do?

June 30: APC Fellows Program application deadline

September 14–15: APC’s Compounders on Capitol Hill 2022, Hilton National Mall, Washington, DC

Short takes

Coming soon: A second printing of Dr. Pamela Smith’s seminal 2008 book, What You Must Know About Women’s Hormones: Guide to Natural Hormone Treatments for PMS, Menopause, Osteoporosis, PCOS and More is due to hit bookshelves early next month. Dr. Smith, a long-time advocate of pharmacy compounding, is the medical director at The Center for Precision Medicine.

Hamsternado, now showing near you: Surely with the best intentions, Georgia State University scientists created gene-edited hamsters for a social neuroscience study. A ScienceDaily article recently reported that the results weren’t quite what they anticipated. Instead of becoming the aloof-but-sweet little angel rodents they expected, the altered hamsters became more social but also more aggressive towards other hamsters of the same-sex. 

To end on a good note: We can’t get this peppy song out of our head—and now, sadly, neither can you.

APC is committed to addressing any concerns or complaints within one business day. Please send them — and, of course, any compliments — to info@a4pc.org.