Pharmacy student attitudes towards a career in older adult care

The United States (US) health care workforce is significantly unprepared to meet the needs of the growing older adult population. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the reasons that current pharmacy students are interested or not interested in pursuing a career or postgraduate training in geriatrics and to evaluate factors that influence this choice.

This is a qualitative study utilizing focus groups of pharmacy students from the doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) curriculum of one public school of pharmacy in the US. Student pharmacists were invited to participate in the focus groups, and focused interviews were conducted by two postgraduate year two geriatric residents. Each discussion was audio recorded and subsequently transcribed, extracting key factors through open thematic coding.

Focus group participants (n = 8) most commonly identified job security, relationship value add, and past positive experiences with older adults as encouraging factors promoting interest, and inadequate geriatric exposure, emotional impact of death and dying, and heightened professional liability as discouraging factors deterring interest in a career in geriatrics.

Enhancing early exposure to geriatric patients and pharmacists, emphasizing common geriatric considerations in the PharmD curriculum, and increasing specialized older adult and end of life content could encourage more student pharmacists to seek careers in geriatrics.