MADISON, Wis. — Nationwide, big-name retailers and small community pharmacies are struggling to find pharmacists. The challenge to recruit more is magnified in rural areas.

UW-Madison is offering a new program to help build a pharmacy workforce in Wisconsin. It’s called the PharmD Early Assurance Program.

It offers high school seniors and first-semester freshmen at UW System universities an assurance that they’ll be admitted into UW-Madison’s Doctor of Pharmacy program.

Those students must have a 3.2 grade point average and commit to taking years of pre-requisite classes like calculus, chemistry and physics before transferring to the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy.

Payten Totz, a freshman at UW Oshkosh, was accepted into the PharmD Early Assurance Program. She knew by the end of high school that she’d like to become a pharmacist.

“I settled on pharmacy because it was a really good combination of chemistry and being able to help people at the same time,” she said. “I kind of read into it, and knew it was a great opportunity. This is what I want to go into, so this is what I should do.”

Totz will spend two years completing her pre-pharmacy course work in Oshkosh, all while working and saving money to be able to take the next step in Madison.

“Right now, the goal is to become a pharmacist working on the retail end of things, knowing that I’ll be able to help patients, not necessarily having to be on the bedside of things in a hospital setting,” she said.

The Assistant Dean of PharmD Admissions, Jeremy Altschafl, said this is a game-changer.

“What was missing was a pathway,” he said. “To make it clear, from an applicant standpoint, what you can do, to get from point A to point B.”

He said every student in the program gets matched with a UW-Madison School of Pharmacy advisor early on.

“They're meeting with our advisors here within the PharmD program at least once a semester to make sure that line of communication is open,” Altschafl said. “This program helps alleviate any anxiety on how to get into pharmacy school, which gives an opportunity for our early assurance students to focus more on continuing to learn in the classroom, outside the classroom, all in preparation for them to be the best student pharmacist they can be.”

This is not just filling a need for retail pharmacists. According to UW-Madison’s Doctor of Pharmacy Program, 65% of graduates go on to work in specialized roles coordination patient care in hospitals and clinics.