Navigating Pharmacy Staffing Challenges: Strategies for Success

Chad Ruvalcava July 17, 2025 Reading Time: < 3 minutes

Like other areas of healthcare, the pharmacy industry is not immune to difficulty filling key roles and retaining talent. Low salaries, heavy workloads, and inadequate staffing are the main drivers of attrition in the industry, creating a staffing crisis with dire consequences for patient care, efficiency, and workforce morale.

To counterbalance this crisis, decision-makers in the pharmacy industry must adopt new, flexible workforce strategies — especially as pharmacy workflows evolve across hospitals, long-term care, and specialty dispensing environments.

The Operational Impact of Pharmacy Staffing Challenges

The principal players in any pharmacy are pharmacy technicians and pharmacists. For optimal efficiency, quality of service, and patient safety, a pharmacy should have a certain number of technicians for every pharmacist. A little more than half of all U.S. states require a minimum pharmacist-to-technician ratio to ensure such standards. The rest have no quantitative staffing standards.¹ Even in regulated states, many pharmacies are experiencing staffing shortages, giving rise to a range of issues.

Longer Customer Wait Times

When pharmacies don’t have enough people to do the job, the job takes longer. Stories from pharmacies around the country illustrate how this has played out. At a Boston pharmacy, for example, patients have found themselves waiting in queues for upwards of an hour only to be told their prescriptions weren’t ready.² In Phoenix, customers have waited 45 minutes or longer for medications that normally take five to 10 minutes to fill.³

Prescription and Vaccination Errors

Shortages exacerbate the pressure of working in a pharmacy’s detail-oriented roles, making prescription and vaccination errors more likely. Employees need the time to check and double-check customers’ orders so that they receive the right medications, but workforce shortages have created stressful conditions that impact the careful administration of duties.

Decreased Customer Satisfaction

At one time, the pharmacy represented possibly the most expedient and even perfunctory segment of the healthcare ecosystem. Now, many people are often spending more time in the pharmacy line than the physician’s waiting room. The combination of long wait times and potentially dangerous prescription errors have left customers understandably frustrated.

Increased Operational Costs

An American Society of Health-System Pharmacist survey shows that 97% of responding administrators have taken to using overtime to compensate for workforce shortages.⁴ Because OT pay equals time-and-a-half, that means pharmacies are paying more to achieve as much or even less productivity than a complete workforce.

Strategic Pharmacy Staffing for Success

Strategic staffing is an approach to human resources that ensures an organization has the optimal number and mix of permanent and temporary workers to fulfill present and future business needs. Broadly speaking, it encompasses at least six key elements:

Strategic alignment: The practice of shaping the workforce around short- and long-term goals
Employer branding: Establishing an environment that attracts and retains great talent
Human resource intelligence: Identifying candidates who align with the organization
Development: Creating opportunities for advancement for existing staff
Capacity planning: Forecasting potential needs to plan for the roles, skills, and other factors that future developments may require
Schedule optimization: Allocating the right number of people at the right times to maximize productivity and satisfy individuals’ expectations

Strategic staffing gives your pharmacy the flexibility it needs to scale up or down as circumstances demand. It also functions as a cost-saving measure. Lower-cost temporary staff have fewer fixed expenses, benefits costs, and operational inefficiencies. For high-volume facilities and remote workflows, this flexibility is critical to maintaining stability.

Comprehensive Pharmacy Staffing Solutions with Medix

Strategic staffing requires significant analysis and preparation, which understaffed pharmacies don’t have the time or resources to conduct. The solution, then, is to outsource the effort to an expert in allied recruiting and staffing, such as Medix. With more than two decades of healthcare staffing experience, Medix has cultivated an extensive pool of talent — including pharmacy technicians and licensed pharmacists — and a strong reputation for compliance, speed, and service.

A partnership with Medix gives you the flexibility to fill out your workforce with contract, contract-to-hire, and permanent placements with minimal effort. Such a labor mix enables you to anchor your staff with long-term candidates and respond to shifts in demand as needed. Ramp up your contingent staff to take pressure off your permanent teammates, or ramp down when circumstances allow.

How Medix Benefits Pharmacies

Strategic staffing through a Medix partnership not only improves your staff’s ability to respond to shifting needs but also provides your organization with several key benefits:

Staff fulfillment: With Medix as your pharmacy recruiting partner, you gain access to a talent pool of over 3 million qualified candidates. Based on your needs, we identify, vet, and onboard recruits on your behalf.
Specialized talent: The Medix talent pool includes licensed pharmacists, certified pharmacy technicians, and candidates transitioning from retail to clinical settings — ready to support both traditional and specialty operations.
Reduced staffing costs: With Medix, you can focus your talent search on lower-cost local talent as well as contract and contract-to-hire candidates for your contingent workforce.
Improved retention: Our MyPrint soft skills assessment tool helps us identify candidates whose qualities align with your organizational culture.

Build a Flexible, Responsive Pharmacy Workforce With Medix

Diversifying your pharmacy staff with a balanced labor mix is the cost-effective key to satisfying the expectations of both your customers and your current workforce.
Whether you’re a hospital pharmacy, long-term care facility, or a specialty pharmacy adapting to remote workflows, Medix delivers the right skills, the right culture fit, and the right staffing model to move your operations forward.

Contact Medix today to learn how our tailored pharmacy staffing solutions can help your team thrive.

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