Acts of attrition: The pressure on our clinical pharmacists

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

evolve. There cannot be blame for those that have left the bedside for alternative endeavors. For many, the perceived differences in quality of life are profound as it may translate to better compensation, bene-fits, and workflow structuring. Corporate businesses are a world away from direct patient care in this way. Within industry, the pharmacist is held in high regards as an asset to the company for their expertise in pharmacotherapy, project management, and clinical research interpre-tation and implementation. This level of necessity for the role of the clinical pharmacist in healthcare systems is often not communicated with the same regularity or intensity. Furthermore, the career ladder in these non-patient facing roles is also flexible and contains numer-ous opportunities for the creation of a promotional pathway. Clinical pharmacy can tag on to some of these opportunities to increase their own retention. Until that time, the slow trickle of attrition will become a land-slide. All the while, there are some of us left in the middle, frozen, to wonder if similar workforce burnout will transcend non-patient facing roles as we are observing within corporate culture. We are in the early phases of feeling the ground begin to shift beneath us in an irrepara-ble way. This clinical attrition is just the beginning in the post-pandemic adjustment back to reality. However, will the profession heed the warning and recalculate and examine its current course? Tincture of time will be the only thing to determine how clinical pharmacists decide to interpret the canaries in front of us. For the early mid-career practitioner — for us writing this paper — we are growing fewer and fewer in the meantime. We are precariously perched at a confluence — how we interpret these early attrition warning signs and continue on is yet to be fully realized.