During Pharmacy Practice Reviews, Compliance Officers have been receiving questions around the appropriateness of recording the use of these drugs on a patient’s record. This installment of PRP Insights highlights some considerations that registrants should be aware of when choosing to make these entries into a patient’s record.
This article reviews the requirements for counselling and will shed some light on situations where Compliance Officers have observed gaps in the provision of patient counselling in both community and hospital settings. The relevant bylaw requirements for counselling in community and hospital settings are outlined below
A practitioner’s signature is an important component of a prescription that assists registrants in determining the authenticity of a prescription. With electronic prescribing software becoming more commonplace, registrants are seeing an increase in electronically generated prescriptions and oftentimes, these are signed with electronic signatures. As registrants may be more accustomed to receiving prescriptions that are signed pen-to-paper, there have been some questions around the acceptability of this practice. In this article, we hope to provide some clarity on the requirements around electronic signatures.
As a continuation of our previous article discussing our early findings with respect to areas of non-compliance that were observed during reviews of residential care services, this article will discuss additional areas of potential improvement based on continued observations by Compliance Officers.
Compliance Officers have been conducting practice reviews in the hospital setting since April 2017. With some years of experience now, the Compliance Officer team would like to share and address some feedback received from registrants who have undergone a Pharmacy Professionals Review in a hospital setting.
Once their pharmacy has been confirmed for a review, one of the pharmacy managers’ key functions is to schedule their registrant staff for their individual Pharmacy Professionals Reviews. In order to help pharmacy managers streamline the scheduling process, we’ve compiled the following list of frequently asked questions and answers.
During hospital Pharmacy Practice Reviews, Compliance Officers have observed registrants processing medication orders prior to ensuring that the patient profile was up-to-date. As pharmacists rely on the information in the patient record to assess the appropriateness and safety of medications, maintaining an up-to-date and accurate patient profile is critical for the safe delivery of drug therapy.
Pharmacy care for residential care patients is essential to our health care system and the well-being of our aging population. As the senior population size, medical complexities and number of transitions between levels of care increase, so does the probability of medication incidents and the potential for ill effects.
As a relatively new component of the Practice Review Program, Compliance Officers would like to share some of their early findings in areas where non-compliance has been observed for residential care services.
During Pharmacy Practice Reviews, Compliance Officers have come across a number of pharmacies that have not reported changes to the layout of their pharmacies after undergoing renovation. The College requires that the current layout of a pharmacy be consistent with the pharmacy diagram that the College has on record.
Patient identification verification refers to the matching of a patient to an intended treatment. It is a key activity performed by all healthcare professionals in a hospital setting. Risk to patient safety occurs when there is a mismatch between a given patient and the pharmaceutical care intended for him or her, whether the care is in the form of dispensing a medication, monitoring a patient’s drug therapy or something as simple as discussing or requesting a patient’s information over the phone.