MANAGING THE DEMAND FOR PHARMACEUTICAL STAFF IN UKRAINE

The pharmaceutical industry in Ukraine is dynamically developing in Ukraine, however not everything is painless. One of the main problems of this industry is staff shortage. The situation is typical for similar sectors of the economy, which are in the process of active development. The article analyzes the labor market in pharmacy from 2017 until now, reveals a systemic shortage of personnel and offers a number of measures to manage the demand for workforce. Thus, it was found that in the pre-­Covid period, the number of vacancies for provisors and pharmacists increased (according to the new classification, these are pharmacists and pharmacist assistants), but in 2020, with the outbreak of the pandemic, everything changed. Nowadays, the pharmaceutical market is experiencing a lack of provisors (i. e. pharmacists according to the new classification) and an abundance of pharmacist assistants. The growth rate of demand for pharmacists (provisors) is consistently higher than their supply in the labor market. In 2021, the Ministry of Economy introduced changes to the classifier of professions, which led to some confusion in the terms, therefore they have to be clarified each time. This applies primarily to analysis in dynamics, because the data is signed according to the requirements that were relevant at that time, the requirements are different, and this worsens the understanding of information deployed in time. In order to manage the demand for staff in pharmacy, the authors have identified two blocks of measures. The first concerns employers and consists in increasing the social package for employees. The paper proves that this is both a material and moral stimulus (through the pyramid of Maslow's needs). The wage data used for the analysis, taken from different sources, differ significantly. Thus, the data of the State Employment Center on the wages of pharmacy workers are much lower than the data from other sources, so employers possess the resources to increase the social package. The second block of measures concerns the training of specialists in higher education institutions. We are talking about increasing the number of higher education institutions that train personnel for pharmacy and reducing the amount of bureaucracy in the educational process. In the future, the problem of personnel shortage will not be easily solved and still be relevant for a long time.