Pharmacy Staff Shortages: What to Do When You Cannot Hire

The job ad has been up for eleven weeks. You have had two applications, one from someone who wanted three days a week in a town four hours away. Meanwhile the roster is held together by a locum. Your best assistant is doing overtime she did not ask for, and you have started declining service bookings because nobody is free to do them.

In short: you probably cannot hire your way out of this, and the evidence suggests paying more mostly moves staff between pharmacies rather than adding any. The workable path is reducing the workload each person carries, using four levers: task shifting, automating admin, taking the routine phone off the bench, and retention.

The shortage is real, and it is not what most owners assume

The instinct is to read a staffing shortage as a supply problem that resolves once enough graduates arrive. The numbers do not support that reading.

The Australian pharmacy workforce has grown by under 1 percent per year since 2018, a rate that already includes new graduates and skilled migration. Against that, an estimated 400 to 600 pharmacists leave the industry each year. Registrations keep setting records, but the net gain is thin and demand is not waiting.

Europe sits in the same position. The PGEU represents community pharmacists across 33 European countries. It describes a worn-out workforce shaped by retirement, burnout and career diversification, alongside educational capacity that has not kept pace. This is structural in both markets, not a local hiring slump.

Does paying more fix a pharmacy staffing shortage?

It is the first lever most owners reach for, and the weakest one available.

Australian pharmacists were already generally paid above award, with many on 32 to 55 percent above the applicable award classification across 2022 and 2023. Rural and regional rates already exceed metropolitan ones. The premium is not a secret weapon. It is the going rate.

So when you raise your offer, you are not creating a pharmacist. You are bidding for one who already works somewhere else, usually against an owner who can bid back. Money is still worth using, but treat it as a retention tool for the people you have. As an acquisition strategy it is bidding for people who do not exist.

The four levers that actually add capacity

If headcount is fixed, the only variable left is how much work each head carries. These are the four places that work hides, ordered by how quickly they pay back.

Lever	What it frees up	Effort to set up
Task shifting	Pharmacist hours spent on work that does not need registration	Low, mostly a written scope and training
Automating admin	Repetitive data entry, reconciliation, reminders	Medium, depends on your systems
Taking the phone off the bench	Constant interruption during dispensing	Medium
Retention	The cost and disruption of replacing people	Ongoing

1. Shift every task that does not need a pharmacist

Most owners who audit their own week are surprised by how much registered time went to stock receiving, expiry checks, chasing orders, booking appointments and answering the phone. There is a method for this at the end of the piece.

None of that requires a pharmacist’s registration, and the workforce is already shaped for it. Pharmacy sales assistants are the single largest group at 50 percent of the Australian pharmacy workforce. With pharmacy technicians, they make up just under 60 percent of it. Define what sits with which role in writing, train to it, then hold the line, because the boundary erodes quietly whenever the shop gets busy.

2. Automate the admin, not the advice

The PGEU’s workforce recommendations name this directly. They call for early adoption of technological solutions to automate and alleviate administrative tasks, and for cutting bureaucracy so workloads stay manageable.

That is a professional body treating automation as a workforce measure rather than a technology fashion. The tasks worth targeting are the repetitive ones with clear rules: reorder prompts, expiry alerts, invoice reconciliation, appointment reminders. Clinical judgement stays with the pharmacist, which is the whole point.

3. Take the routine phone load off the dispensary bench

The phone is the most underrated staffing problem in community pharmacy, because it never appears on the roster.

In a 30 day audit of every inbound call to one Australian community pharmacy, 74.9 percent of calls went unanswered across 3,988 calls. Crucially, 99.1 percent of all inbound calls arrived during opening hours. This is not an after-hours gap. It is a capacity problem at the busiest moment of the day.

Every one of those calls is also an interruption aimed at whoever is closest, usually mid-dispense. The cost is paid twice, once in the lost call and once in the broken concentration. We covered the mechanics in reducing phone interruptions for pharmacy staff.

4. Keep the staff you already have

Replacing a good assistant costs more than most owners count, once you include recruitment, training, and the months of reduced output while someone learns your systems.

The PGEU’s retention list is unglamorous and accurate: transparent career progression, less bureaucracy, manageable workloads, and pay that reflects the work. Two of those four are workload items. Fixing the first three levers is itself a retention strategy, because what burns people out is usually the volume of interruption, not the clinical work they trained for.

What to do this month

Start with measurement, because the levers only work when pointed at the right task.

Run a one week time audit across your registered staff, in fifteen minute blocks, recording task and role. Then sort the results into three columns: needs a pharmacist, needs a trained assistant, needs nobody at all. The third column is your automation list. The second is your task shifting list.

Most pharmacies find more in columns two and three than they expected. That is capacity you already own.

Where Krepko fits

The phone is the lever we work on. Emily is our AI voice agent for Australian pharmacies. She answers routine calls using your pharmacy’s real data, and passes anything clinical or complex straight to a pharmacist.

The point is not to remove a person from the roster. It is to stop the busiest hour of the day arriving as an interruption at the dispensary bench. The staff you did manage to hire then spend their time on work that needs them. The full call audit data shows what that volume looks like in practice.

If staffing pressure is squeezing your margins too, how pharmacies save money covers the cost side. The future of community pharmacy looks at where the workforce is heading. You can see how Emily works at krepko.com.au.