Summary data from the National Inventory of Pharmacists: United States, 1978-79.

Between May 1977 and June 1979, the National Center for Health Statistics conducted an inventory of all licensed pharmacists in the United States. The data -ollection spanned 2 years in an effort to time each te’s survey to correspond with its license renewal eriod for pharmacists. Results from this survey indicate that there were 160,664 licensed pharmacists, of which 112,335 were known to be active in their profession, 20,912 were inactive, and the activity status of 27,417 was unknown (table 1). As seen in this table, the percent of active pharmacists decreases as age increases. For those under age 30, 95 percent were active, while only 47 percent of those 65 years and older were active. This trend occurs among both sexes, although at every age a smaller percent of licensed female pharmacists are active. Table 1 indicates that 21 percent of active pharmacists are under age 30, while 12 percent are age 60 and over. Therefore, there is a sufllcient influx of young pharmacists into the profession to replace the older pharmacists who are most likely to be leaving the profession. In table 2, the activity status for those pharmacists who did not report this information is imputed by apportioning the 27,417 pharmacists with unknown activity status into categories in the same ratio as among the pharmacists whose activity status is known. Of the resulting 135,449 active pharmacists, the largest number is located in the South (43,932). New England s the highest ratio of active pharmacists per 100,000 >pulation (69.0), while the Paciilc division has the owest ratio (55.9).