Community pharmacies across Canada are proving they can be patient destinations for primary care. At the Canadian Foundation for Pharmacy’s Pharmacy Forum educational webinar in November 2024, pharmacists from Nova Scotia, Alberta and Ontario shared their experiences changing their practices to provide more primary-care services—and how it’s benefiting patients and the profession.
Nova Scotia
Kaitlynn d’Entrement, pharmacy manager at City Drug Store PharmaChoice in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, talked about her pharmacy’s participation in the Community Pharmacy Primary Care Clinics, a provincially funded pilot of pharmacist-led primary clinics in that has since become a permanent model of practice.
The program funds pharmacies to bill for assessments for more than 30 minor ailments, as well as for strep-throat assessments (including point-of-care testing [POCT]), chronic disease management and POCT as needed for renewals and chronic disease management. Pharmacies also receive a monthly stipend to help cover the added labour costs.
“Personally, I really enjoyed the expansion in scope [for diagnosing diabetes and hypertension] as we see many patients for prescription renewals who haven’t had a family doctor in many years,” said d’Entrement. “Being able to screen for these conditions has really made our team feel like primary care providers and offer a more well-rounded form of care for our patients.”
She noted that the comments from patients to date had been “incredibly positive” too.
On top of helping fill a critical care gap in rural Nova Scotia, the pharmacy’s clinic setting has made her job more professionally satisfying, challenging and interesting. “The clinic has taken much workload stress off dispensing pharmacists,” said d’Entrement.
Ontario
A full-time clinical pharmacist at one of nine Rexall Pharmacy Pharmacist Care Walk-In Clinics in Ontario, Roland Vaisman outlined all the efforts undertaken to design these new spaces. That includes the addition of a spacious check-in/waiting area, signage promoting the clinic’s services and pharmacists, assessment and care rooms equipped with POCT devices, and kiosks to help patients connect to telemedicine partners as needed.
Vaisman summarized that the clinic design is meant to help pharmacists provide patients with a “personalized, white-glove service, while practising at the fullest scope available in the province.”
Alberta
In opening a pharmacist-led primary care clinic at Shoppers Drug Mart in Glendale, Alberta, pharmacist and associate-owner Amani Chehade talked about the corporate commitment to providing a more comprehensive range of clinical services to patients, especially for newcomers to Canada without a family doctor. “We’re aiming to open 250 locations by 2025,” she said.
A key service at the clinics is the Heart Health Screening assessment at no cost for eligible patients to check for diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol, with results in minutes. “This gives us a clear picture of the patient’s health status, and early identification of any risk factors [so we can] work together to create a plan to manage the health of the patient effectively,” said Chehade. “As pharmacists in pharmacist-led clinics we really feel passionate about what we’re doing.”
While primary-care services in community pharmacies are clearly benefiting patients, feasible funding models are still a work in progress, agreed the three presenters.
“The goal is to break even so we can stay sustainable and from what I see…that goal is being achieved,” said Vaisman, noting that these initiatives also make a statement to government and other stakeholders that pharmacists have sufficient training to provide these services.
Learn more about these pharmacist-led primary care clinics in CFP’s 2024 edition of The Changing Face of Pharmacy, published in November 2024.