Current health system reforms are focused on delivering more timely access to healthcare and improving health outcomes, with a more preventive approach to help keep people healthy and well in our communities, to take pressure off general practices and hospitals.
Fiscal pressures also mean the government has an increased focus on seeking better value for money health expenditure.
This focus has created opportunities for community pharmacy service role expansion, including enabling the full range of immunisation services, piloting of minor health condition services and exploring further extended pharmacy services.
However, taking advantage of potential service opportunities is challenging when you don't have the workforce to provide additional services. We need improved policy settings and funding to enable this.
Workforce data
The 2024 Health Workforce Plan (the plan) was released in December 2024, and included estimates of:
- a current pharmacist shortage of around 1,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) pharmacists
- a current technician shortage of around 620 FTE pharmacy technicians
- a need for 570 more FTE pharmacists by 2033 in addition to the current pipeline.
The actions identified for the pharmacy workforce in the plan are:
- match tertiary training capacity to future need – to outline required tertiary training growth to meet demand by 2035
- attract students to health careers – by launching a national attraction campaign to get students interested in health careers
- improve graduate transitions – establish 20 additional new entry practice roles for allied professionals, with a focus on innovative care settings.
We don’t believe these actions will effectively address our workforce needs as they fail to address the true extent of our workforce shortages and, most importantly, fail to address our biggest staff recruitment and retention issue – pay parity.
It is also difficult for overseas trained pharmacists from some countries – the Non-Recognised Equivalent Qualification Route – to come and work in New Zealand, and the plan hasn’t considered this huge pool of potential staff.
PGNZ workforce advocacy
We continue to push for development and implementation of a sustainable community pharmacy funding model to enable pharmacy owners to pay their staff what they are worth.
We have recently secured commitments from Health New Zealand to develop a sustainable funding model in 2026/27 and develop a nationwide contracting policy for awarding new community pharmacy agreements.
We have been pushing for these for some time – sustainable funding will help address pay parity issues and a contracting policy should mean pharmacies don’t open in areas where there are already sufficient pharmacy numbers, further diluting the limited workforce.
PGNZ has a draft community pharmacy sector workforce plan which identifies recruitment and retention issues for the various community pharmacy roles and the agency or organisation responsible or able to fix the issue.
Workforce issues
We do, however, recognise the value of working with others to progress workforce issues.
Community pharmacy organisations across the sector are dealing with the need to address workforce challenges, while also maximising and creating opportunities to expand community pharmacy services.
It makes sense to pool the knowledge and resources of likeminded organisations to address common issues and achieve common goals.
This is why we are currently leading work via the Community Pharmacy Leaders Forum (CPLF) to develop a comprehensive workforce plan to ensure community pharmacy can deliver its vital and growing role and continue supporting patients with timely access to needed services.
CPLF was established by PGNZ and consists of the leaders of national community pharmacy organisations and local community pharmacy groups.
While this plan is being worked on, we continue to achieve wins for members wherever possible, in the past this has included getting pharmacists added to the Voluntary Bonding Scheme and the Green List’s Straight to Residence pathway.
