B.C. pharmacists are looking to expand their scope of service to include some blood tests as well as the treatment of minor ailments like insect bites or rashes.
B.C. Pharmacy Association director of pharmacy practice support Derek Desrosiers said with some upgraded training, pharmacists would be able to bring increased accessibility to the healthcare system and save the government money at the same time.
"We're a little bit behind some of the other provinces in terms of clinical services pharmacists are able to offer," Desrosiers said. "One of the areas we'd like to look more into is the treatment and prescribing for minor ailments."
Depending on the type of service the pharmacists may want to add, it could require either a change in legislation or a modification in bylaws at the College of Pharmacists at British Columbia.
Desrosiers said his group is lobbying government to give pharmacists the ability to test the blood of people who are taking certain types of anticoagulation medication. Currently those patients need to go to a lab up to 16 times a year to monitor the effectiveness of their medication. After they visit the lab, the results need to be communicated to their doctor and then to the patient.
Conversely, Desrosiers said pharmacists, given the proper equipment and training, would be able to do the test and provide the results to patients in one visit, which would be more convenient and cheaper.
Desrosiers said expanding the services a pharmacist can provide can be particularly helpful in northern and rural B.C., especially those that only have one or two pharmacy locations.
"In those communities, they're so small that the pharmacy is a bit of a hub and an access point to health care," he said. "A lot of those communities don't have convenient or readily accessible lab services or public health clinics and so the ability to get a vaccine at a pharmacy makes it much more convenient for sure."
Desrosiers hopes that the necessary approvals can be in place later this year, but he said the biggest challenging is convincing the provincial government to reassign funds to different areas within the health ministry, which he called "a bit of a sticking point."
In an emailed statement, the Ministry of Health said it is willing to consider ways to improve service and reduce costs, but said before the scope of practice for pharmacists can be increased, the government must be certain that there will indeed be savings and that patient care will not be compromised.
"In the past, we have increased services to patients through pharmacists, when it provided a clear benefit to patients and is cost-effective for government," the ministry wrote.
Pharmacists have added new duties in the past. Four years ago, they were given the ability to provide some injections, most notably the flu vaccine and are expected to provide more than 360,000 doses of the immunization provincewide this year.
In Northern Health's region, 86 per cent of pharmacies have at least one pharmacist qualified to provide vaccines.
The expanded scope has, at times, provoked the ire of some physicians' organizations but Desrosiers said the two groups of medical professionals continue to work together harmoniously. He doesn't expect much push back on this latest request to expand pharmacists duties.
"Whenever we have something new that comes along, injections would be a good example, there's a little bit of resistance and mostly we hear it from the organizational bodies, the advocacy groups like the Doctor's of BC - not so much from the grassroots physicians," he said. "Once they see that the service has been implemented and the results are good and that patient safety isn't compromised or patient care isn't compromised, those issues tend to go away."
Doctors of B.C. president Dr. William Cunningham was unavailable for an interview for this story.
