Travis Padgett has plenty of reasons for wanting to stay close to home.
Padgett’s life is here – his fiance and her job, his family, his friends and his band, The Box Jockeys. He wants his future as a pharmacist to be here, too.
Padgett, who graduates in May, is a pre-pharmacy student at ETSU looking to enroll in a school that won’t take him away from everyone, and everything, he loves.
He became an advocate for the proposed pharmacy school at ETSU as soon as he first heard it was a possibility. After getting involved in a letter-writing campaign to gain support from elected officials, he has “pushed” and talked to as many people as possible.
“I didn’t even apply to Memphis,” Padgett said of the University of Tennessee College of Pharmacy. “It’s just too far away.
I told someone the other day that I may as well apply in Canada,” he said, touting the line Northeast Tennesseans like to give when talking about the 500-mile distance between one end of the state and the other.
Though Padgett has been accepted at the University of Appalachia College of Pharmacy in Grundy, Va., he’s not sure if he’ll “hang out” and wait for the ETSU pharmacy school to open in 2007, or go ahead and start at another school.
Grundy is closer, only 100 miles away, but it still takes potential pharmacists out of the state, he said. And that bothers Padgett.
With businesses in Tennessee hiring about 350 pharmacists annually, and the only pharmacy program in the state, UT, currently matriculating 125 per year, the deficit is clear.
“There’s a shortage of pharmacists in Northeast Tennessee and all around,” said Bruce Behringer, assistant vice president of rural and community health at ETSU.
Also, of the pharmacists UT produces every year, not all of them go into practice, Behringer said. Some go into research and teaching, further reducing the number of available pharmacists.
Those statistics could improve somewhat with geographically closer pharmacy schools like UA and a proposed expansion of the UT class size to 200. However, Northeast Tennesseans will continue to be an underserved population, by all accounts.
Padgett, who works for Kroger Pharmacy on State of Franklin Road, confirmed how this fact played into everyday life at the office. “When our pharmacist went on vacation, we had to bring someone in from Northern Kentucky to fill in,” he said.
With pharmacists playing an increasingly vital role in health care, a lack of them, especially a lack of ones experienced in rural health care, can cause big problems, said Guy Wilson, owner of Wilson Pharmacy and one of the main advocates of the pharmacy school at ETSU.
“In this day and time, there’s a real arsenal of prescription medication,” Wilson said. “They can help people, but they can also be very dangerous chemicals. We need very experienced pharmacists, otherwise [these chemicals] could cost us a lot of money and hurt people instead of help them.”
That’s where the programs at ETSU might be able to make a difference, Behringer said.
With the nature and demands of pharmacology changing, pharmacists’ are playing a more important role in keeping patients healthy, Behringer said.
“Put yourself at your parents’ or grandparents’ age,” he said. “Think about the types of health problems they have – how they use pharmacists and drug stores. Think about your grandmother carrying her bag of prescriptions around.”
The purpose of this, he said, is to understand that all those prescriptions can either help or hurt, depending on how the pharmaceuticals work together or work against each other. Health care providers and patients alike rely on the pharmacist’s knowledge to help them know what medications to take and how to take them.
ETSU currently is the only medical school in the country that offers a 15-week course where medical students, nursing students and allied health professional students take health communication courses together, Behringer said.
Adding a pharmacy school to the ETSU health program can only enrich this dialogue, he said. “If pharmacists don’t know how to talk to doctors and if doctors don’t know how to talk to pharmacists, then you run into problems.
“It will give us another perspective, and not just to understand how pharmacists work but to help keep people more healthy.”

Author