FEBRUARY 2021 – A research paper looking at the impact of policy changes on MedsCheck services in Ontario earned lead author Ahmad Shakeri the 2020 Canadian Foundation for Pharmacy/Association of Faculties of Pharmacy (CFP/AFP) Graduate Student Award for Pharmacy Practice Research.
“We know that the 2016 policy change increased paperwork across all services and required additional training for MedsCheck Diabetes, but there was no paper/analysis that examined the impact of this change on the delivery of MedsChecks across all of Ontario,” says Shakeri, on the impetus behind his research topic.
For the award-winning paper, Impact of Policy Changes on the Delivery of MedsCheck Servcies in Ontario: An interrupted Time-Series Analysis, Shakeri and his team examined the impact of the policy change 24 months pre- and post-intervention on the monthly number of MedsCheck services delivered. Given the sharp decline of these services in the community following policy changes, the authors concluded that better-executed implementation strategies were needed for future policies to ensure the feasibility and sustainability of professional community pharmacy services.
The paper also noted that a better understanding of the impacts of the 2016 policy change on the quality of MedsChecks services and outcomes—and the potential harms from cancelling many of these services—are still needed to inform future policy-decision making.
Shakeri, who is currently working towards his MSc degree at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, received a $750 award grant from CFP.
The CFP/AFPC award is bestowed on a pharmacy graduate student for the best research paper published or accepted for publication during the year preceding the annual AFPC meeting.
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