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GREENSBORO — When recruiting pharmacists for the Moses Cone Health System’s five hospitals, Brian Romig often has to look outside the Piedmont Triad.

“Advertising locally is not as helpful to us,” said Romig, Moses Cone’s executive director for pharmacy. “We have to sometimes reach beyond that.”

Romig is among a host of individuals and groups in Greensboro who say there is a shortage of pharmacists in the area and the state — and a pharmacy school at UNCG could help solve that problem, they say.

At the same time, supporters say, the school could draw businesses to the area and create much-needed jobs.

A year after receiving a proposal for the pharmacy school, the UNC system is sending a team of consultants to UNCG on Friday to evaluate the plan. The consultants will make a report to system officials, and the matter could land on the board of governors’ April agenda.

UNCG administrators are confident in their proposal, which calls for a research-intensive pharmacy school that draws on community partnerships.

But the system also is considering a plan from UNC-Chapel Hill to establish a satellite pharmacy school in Asheville. Chapel Hill is home to the state’s only public pharmacy school.

UNCG officials repeatedly have said the two proposals are vastly different and they don’t see UNC-CH’s proposal as competition. But with the state in a financial crunch again this year, system officials are likely to go with only one plan.

Education and research

The UNCG pharmacy school has gained momentum in the past couple of years. But it was first considered in the 1990s.

“I don’t know that we had the sciences to support it. We do now,” said David Perrin, UNCG’s provost and executive vice chancellor. “We have very ... strong sciences at the undergraduate level. We have the Ph.D. in medicinal biochemistry. So we’re in a much better position now with the supporting course work for a school of pharmacy than we were back then.”

Also in UNCG’s favor is the healthy job outlook for pharmacists. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2010-11 Occupational Outlook Handbook says employment of pharmacists is expected to grow by 17 percent between 2008 and 2018, faster than average for other occupations. The bureau cites, as reasons for the demand, the growing numbers of middle-age and elderly people, who use more prescription medications, as well as scientific advances that are leading to the creation of new drugs.

The doctor of pharmacy degree takes six years, including four years of professional study. Job opportunities include advising patients and dispensing medications in neighborhood pharmacies, monitoring drug therapies for hospital patients, and researching and developing products in the pharmaceutical industry.

UNCG is asking to establish a school that would not only offer a doctor of pharmacy degree but, over time, a doctorate in pharmaceutical science and possibly a nanopharmacology program in conjunction with the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering.

These are programs that could transform the university, Perrin said.

“One of our goals is to become a higher-level research university and to generate more sponsored research, externally funded research,” Perrin said. “Once we’re up and fully operational, this should generate between five and six million ... additional dollars a year in externally funded research.”

Perrin said the pharmacy program is likely to attract good students who would enhance the undergraduate profile of the university.

It could have similar effects at N.C. A&T and GTCC, whose leaders have their own interest in seeing the pharmacy school become a reality.

UNCG officials have talked with A&T Chancellor Harold Martin about holding open spaces in the school for Martin’s students. UNCG’s diverse undergraduate population coupled with A&T could help address the lack of minorities in the field, Perrin said.

GTCC is considering moving its pharmacy technology program to the pharmacy school. President Donald Cameron said the program has become so popular in just three years that he’s had to add another faculty member.

Sharing learning space would give GTCC students the chance to work alongside pharmacists — just as they do in the workplace.

Community connection

It’s important for student pharmacists to have clinical training sites nearby for their final years of school, said Romig, a pharmacist for 26 years.

And Perrin said he’s been assured by the Triad’s major medical centers that they could accommodate more students. Leaders of Moses Cone, High Point Regional and Lexington Memorial hospitals and Wake Forest University Baptist and Forsyth medical centers all have written letters of support for the school.

Romig said pharmacy students tend to stay close to the programs they’re familiar with, so any UNCG pharmacy school graduates could very well settle in Greensboro or surrounding communities.

And there are businesses here that could benefit from those graduates and the research that UNCG’s pharmacy school would spur, said Patrick Danahy, president and CEO of the Greensboro Partnership, an organization that promotes economic and community development.

In addition to the many area health care organizations that hire pharmacists, there is also a small but growing number of pharmaceutical companies that could use them, he said.

The school could pave the way for a mail-order pharmacy, Danahy said, a large business that would employ as many as 800 to 900 people, many of them pharmacists, to fill prescriptions.

The capital investment for such a facility might be $100 million, he said. “So they’re very attractive businesses that a pharmacy school would put us in a position, that we’re not in right now, to attract.”

The school already has a likely site, on four acres downtown next to the Greensboro Children’s Museum.

The Weaver Foundation purchased the tract a few years ago and has been holding it for a project that could enhance economic development and downtown vitality, said Richard “Skip” Moore, president of the Weaver Foundation and a member of UNCG’s board of trustees.

The pharmacy school — with its potential to leverage grants, attract research dollars and connect faculty to outside companies with stakes in the field — fits that mold, Moore said. “We will give them however much land they need.”

Hurdles to overcome

Money is an issue for the project. Any startup funding the state provides won’t cover construction costs. Planners are still looking at how to raise money to build the school, Moore said. The Weaver Foundation won’t take the lead in that effort.

The school would require about $2 million in start-up funds in 2010-11, according to the proposal submitted last year, and another $2.6 million the following year. UNCG said in its proposal that money could come from the campus or the state.

Implementation expenses would rise to about $3.7 million in 2012-13, but then drop as tuition begins to offset those costs.

In its proposal, UNC-Chapel Hill said using its existing curriculum, faculty and administrative resources for a satellite campus in western North Carolina would require “minimal investment” compared to establishing a free-standing school of pharmacy.

UNC-CH officials also say that with its graduates most likely to settle in urban settings such as the Triangle, Triad and Charlotte, its program produces a sufficient number of pharmacists to meet central North Carolina’s needs.

Fred Eckel, executive director of the North Carolina Association of Pharmacists questions whether a dramatic need for more pharmacists still exists. He points to the fact that many pharmacy schools have increased enrollment and the number of graduates in recent years.

Eckel said he supports neither university’s proposal.

UNCG provost Perrin said the university’s pharmacy school proposal is sound, and he’s “guardedly optimistic” the UNC system will give the project the green light.
When asked what happens if the answer is no, Perrin hesitated. “We’ll survive,” he eventually said, “but I’m trying not to think that way.”   

Contact Jonnelle Davis at 373-7080 or jonnelle.davis@news-record.com