Pharmacy manpower in the United States: a wasted resource

Pharmacists constitute the third largest group of professionally trained health personnel in the United States, yet scant attention has been paid to the problem of inefficient utilization of this manpower resource. This paper focuses on aspects of pharmacy education and practice that characterize the problem of underutilization, and discusses proposed alternative approaches to reduce the disparity between the skills and knowledge acquired through education and those actually applied in current pharmacy practice.