Feedback deadline was: November 13, 2023
Summary
The Ontario College of Pharmacists (OCP or “the College”) regularly reviews its existing policies and guidelines to ensure they are up to date and set clear expectations to guide pharmacy practice in Ontario. As part of this process, the College’s Documentation Guidelines are being updated.
The development of these updated guidelines was informed by a comprehensive review of pharmacy regulatory authorities across Canada, health professional regulators in Ontario, and the College’s practice assessment evaluations, as well as by internal consultation.
Feedback from registrants has indicated that the College’s documentation expectations need to be communicated more clearly. While the College’s expectations remain the same, the draft guidelines aim to provide more clarity to registrants. They incorporate NAPRA’s Standards of Practice for documentation and the College’s practice assessment criteria for documentation. These criteria include the performance indicators that pharmacy professionals are measured against, which will make the guidelines more comprehensive. Other changes include the following:
- Documentation guidance is included for all pharmacy professionals, including pharmacy technicians
- The updated guidance is applicable to any practice setting
- The guidance has been expanded to include electronic documentation
- The guidance now included the minimum practice requirements for pharmacy professionals
How You Can Participate
The College is inviting all pharmacy professionals, system partners, and members of the public to comment below or complete this form by November 13, 2023. Your feedback will help inform any potential changes to the proposed guidance.
When reviewing and commenting on the draft guidelines, please consider and provide feedback on the following:
- The purpose of drafting this policy is to provide pharmacy professionals with direction on the College’s practice expectations for documentation. Do the draft guidelines achieve this purpose?
- Are the draft guidelines clear? Are they comprehensive enough to support professional practice? In what ways might the clarity and/or comprehensiveness of these draft guidelines be improved?
- Have the draft guidelines adequately explained the performance indicators the College uses to evaluate pharmacy professionals’ documentation practices?
Next Steps
After these guidelines have been finalized, the College will make them available on its website, along with practical examples, scenarios, and other information to support efficient documentation in practice. These will help contextualize the guidelines and help pharmacy professionals apply this guidance to real-world situations.
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Helpful Links
This response was submitted by Canadian Society of Hospital Pharmacists – Ontario Branch. Read the full submission here.
This response was submitted by OPA. Read the full submission here.
The job of the pharmacist is to dispense a prescription. Your documentation guidelines assumes that the job of the pharmacist is to assess the patient who was already assessed by a licensed physician. The pharmacist has no need to access the patients lab results. You are putting the pharmacist on a collision course with prescribers with such needless guidelines. As a father and grandfather I refuse to provide any pharmacist with any data beyond the name and birth date of any family member and refuse to authorize any access to any family history or lab results. Your guidelines infringe on my privacy and I don’t want what I privately tell my pharmacist to be documented in any way so other members of the drugstore can read. This is dangerous and should not be allowed.