Community Pharmacist Practice Assessments

The community pharmacist practice assessment criteria focuses on four key areas:

  • patient assessment
  • decision making
  • documentation
  • communication and education

For each area, specific performance indicators — which describe the minimum practice requirement for all community pharmacists — are identified. The guidance section of the criteria illustrates how the performance indicator will apply in practice and provides examples of activities that support each standard.

Through a combination of observation and retrospective review of documentation, practice advisors evaluate the processes in place for each of these areas with respect to new and refill prescriptions, adaptations, pharmacist authorized renewals and professional services (e.g., medication reviews, minor ailments, vaccination services).

Specific documentation needs to be submitted at least two weeks ahead of the scheduled practice assessment date. Please see the FAQs below for information on what and how to submit.

Resources

Key resources to support preparation for the practice assessment include:

 

Document Submission for the Community Pharmacist Practice Assessment

The deadline to submit your documents is 2 weeks prior to your assessment date; however, you may submit your documents earlier if you choose.

We take patient privacy very seriously at the Ontario College of Pharmacists. All document submissions containing personal health information (patient name, etc.) are done via an encrypted web portal. The web portal has end-to-end security, meaning all information is secure from the moment you send the email to the moment we receive it at the College.

Redaction of patient information should be done according to your organization’s policies. Practice advisors do not need access to patient identities to perform the assessment. However, it is important for you to know the identity of your patients to provide any additional information during the assessment. If redacted copies are sent to OCP, you should keep a record of the patient’s name for your own use.

If you are using a personal device for any part of the submission, you should be redacting your documents. If redacting, do so fully and on a copy, not the original documents. Be vigilant for the presence of patient identifiers; these may appear in water marks found on prescriptions. Failure to fully redact, when necessary, may result in a privacy breach.

Please submit the following 8 patient care examples:

  1. New Prescriptions – 2 examples (1 regular prescription & 1 opioid prescription)
  2. Refill Prescriptions – 2 examples (1 regular prescription & 1 opioid prescription)
  3. Pharmacist Authorized Renewals – 2 examples
  4. Adaptation – 1 example*
  5. Professional Service – 1 example (medication review; prescribing that was initiated by you such as minor ailment, smoking cessation, Paxlovid® or Tamiflu® prescribing; vaccination service with a drug therapy problem)

*In the absence of an adaptation, please submit an additional drug therapy problem (see question below)

For each example, please provide:

  1. Prescription
  2. Hardcopy
  3. Screenshot of when you have completed a clinical verification/therapeutic check (showing software generated DUR messages)
  4. Patient profile
  5. Any other documentation or notes made at the time (counselling notes, notes on the patient profile, correspondence with the prescriber, DTP notes, assessment notes, follow-up notes, etc.)

Documentation should be submitted exactly as it looked when you completed it – do not send a separate summary.

Key Points: 

  • Select examples for different patients and different medications.
  • Select recent examples (i.e. within the last three months).
  • Select examples that best demonstrate each of the 4 domains.
  • “New” Prescription = A medication that is brand new for the patient.
  • Ideally, select opioid examples used for pain management.
  • An opioid is NOT a controlled drug, benzodiazepine or other targeted substance.

If you have a specialty role, or you are unable to provide the requested examples, please contact your practice advisor.

A DTP is an event or circumstance involving drug treatment that interferes with the optimization of pharmaceutical care. These are broken down into 7 categories, grouped into four pharmacotherapy needs: Indication, Effectiveness, Safety and Use (or adherence) – IESU/IESA

DTP Not a DTP
  1. Unnecessary drug therapy
  2. Wrong drug
  3. Dose too low
  4. Dose too high
  5. Adverse drug reaction
  6. Inappropriate adherence
  7. Need additional drug therapy
  1. Prescription clarification
  2. Back orders
  3. Illegible prescriber handwriting
  4. Early releases for controlled substances

 

It is important to highlight how you identify and actively manage drug therapy problems (DTPs) to help improve patient outcomes.

A few DTPs must be included within your patient examples to demonstrate how you identify and manage DTPs to help improve patient outcomes.

You need to include different types of DTPs across your examples and be able to demonstrate collaboration with the original prescriber.

Considerations for the Selection of Examples 

All patient care examples must be examples of YOUR work. You will be expected to answer questions about your process in each of the following areas:

  • Clinical check
  • Counselling or patient conversation
  • DTP identification and management
  • Prescriber communication
  • Follow up

For all the requested documentation, you should either:

  • scan the documents and save the screenshots as PDFs (strongly preferred), or
  • take a picture and save as a JPG.

Please ensure the quality of the picture is of good clarity and reasonable size so the practice advisor can read it easily.

For PDFs, use 1 PDF per example (i.e., include all documents for 1 example in the same PDF). Documents should be well organized, so it is easy to figure out what happened.

To ensure that the practice advisor knows which documents correspond to which type of patient care activity, we ask that you please NAME the document attachments to indicate this clearly.

  • For example: NEW RX opioid 1 or MEDSCHECK 2 or NEWLY ROSTERED PATIENT, etc.

If a drug therapy problem is included in the example, please indicate with “DTP”.

  • For example: New Rx regular + DTP.

No. Please submit your documentation exactly as it looked when you completed it. We are trying to assess your everyday practice. You will be given the chance to elaborate during the practice assessment.

Documents MUST be submitted through the encrypted web portal to ensure secure transmission of patient information. Replying outside of the portal can result in a privacy breach.

You will receive an encrypted email from ocpdocumentation@ocpinfo.com where you will be prompted to create an encrypted account.

  • Check your junk mail if you cannot find the encrypted email.
  • The encrypted email automatically deletes 30 days after it is sent.  You will automatically receive another encrypted email about 4 weeks prior to your assessment date.
  • If you have any issues accessing your encrypted email, please contact ocpdocumentation@ocpinfo.com.

Then, follow these steps:

  1. Click on the link to create your account and password.
  2. Complete the new user activation form and click “Activate.”
  3. When you are ready to submit your documents, sign into your account.
  4. After signing into your encrypted account, select the email from OCP Documentation.
  5. REPLY to the document submission email. The “Reply” button may appear as an arrow.
  6. Attach your first example. The “Attach” button may appear as a paperclip.
  7. Browse your files and select your first example.
  8. Your selected example should appear in your email.
  9. Due to email attachment size limitations, please only submit one patient care example per email.
  10. Ensure your name and registration number are in the subject line of each email.
  11. Click Send.
  12. Repeat this process for each of your 8 examples.
  13. Send a SEPARATE email listing the examples you have submitted and the corresponding number of attachments so this can be reconciled. If a specific document example is not possible (i.e., not part of your practice), please indicate that and list the additional drug therapy problem you have provided in its place.

Important:

  • Submit all your examples on the SAME DAY.
  • It takes time to review your submission. Please be patient.  You may not receive a confirmation of receipt immediately.
  • This encrypted email automatically deletes 30 days after it is sent. You will automatically receive a replacement encrypted email 28 days prior to your assessment. This timeline will not affect any documents you have previously submitted for your practice assessment. Your documents will remain on file until your assessment date. If you require an additional encrypted email to be sent, please email ocpdocumentation@ocpinfo.com to request one.
  • Please do not mail or fax any documentation to the College.
  • If you have unique circumstances around documentation submission, please consult with your organization, if required, and discuss directly with your practice advisor.

All documents submitted to the practice advisor for the purpose of the practice assessment will be securely destroyed 15 days after the assessment documentation has been uploaded to OCP’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system according to OCP’s Records Retention Schedule and Privacy Management practices.

The OCP is committed to providing the highest level of security, controls and integrity to support secure email encryption for information transfer. As such our email encryption service provider adheres to the following standards:

  • Web Trust Certified
  • PCI DSS Level 1 Certified
  • Encryption Standards:
    • RSA 2048-bit asymmetric encryption
    • RSA PKCS cryptographic protocols; PKCS#1, #7, #10, #12
    • AES-256 symmetric encryption
    • SHA2 hashing algorithm
    • ANSI X.509 certificates and certificate revocation lists
    • IETF MIME and S/MIME email