In January 2020, College Staff, as part of the British Columbia Health Regulators Cultural Safety Task Force, took part in the First Nations Health Authorities’ (FNHA) Tenth Annual Gathering Wisdom Forum (GWX).
In addition to providing hand-out materials to event attendees, the task force collected responses to different questions, each focused on cultural safety in BC’s healthcare settings.
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.
While BC continues to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important that our province’s health professionals recognize that this is not our only health crisis.
The opioid overdose crisis continues to have a major impact on the province. Since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a public health emergency in March 2020, the BC Coroners Services has detected a sustained increase of illicit drug toxicity deaths, recording six consecutive months with over 100 overdose deaths, three of which saw more than 170 deaths.
September 30th has been declared Orange Shirt Day, in recognition of the harm the residential school system has left on generations of indigenous families and their communities.
“Selling Health” – share your insights on being both a health care provider and retailer
On August 27, 2020 BC Health Minister Adrian Dix announced the release of a report outlining final recommendations for changes to the province’s health profession regulatory system.
On May 1, 2020, the Ministry of Health approved the Community-Based Point-of-Care Testing Policy, which is now in effect.
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.
The BC Centre for disease control has developed a new tool to guide written and digital content about COVID-19 and our lives during the pandemic.
An online survey has been launched inviting BC health care workers to share their experiences of discrimination in health care services. The new survey was announced via news release on July 31, 2020 as part of Addressing Racism: An Independent Investigation into Indigenous-specific Racism in BC Health Care, led by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond.
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.