Please view the document submission FAQ below for pharmacy practice assessments.
As outlined in your initial encrypted email, ideally all documentation should be submitted two weeks ahead of your scheduled practice assessment date. This allows the practice advisor enough time to review thoroughly and to contact you for clarification or missing documents.
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, i.e. secure lifecycle management of information.
Redaction of patient information should be done according to your organization’s policies. Practice advisors do not need access to patient identities in order 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 the OCP, you should keep a record of the patient’s name for your own use.
When you first receive the encrypted email from the practice advisor, you will be asked to create an email encryption account with a username and password (details will be attached to your encrypted email). Once you have created this account, you are able to log-in at any time.
For all of the requested documentation, it is suggested you either scan the documents and save screen shots as PDF, or take a picture and save as JPEG (picture). All of these types of documents can be ATTACHED to an encrypted email via the portal. Please ensure the quality of the picture is of good clarity and reasonable size so the practice advisor can read it easily.
PLEASE NOTE: compressed files are NOT permitted
You will NOT have the ability to compose a new email in the encrypted account. Please REPLY to the original encrypted email that was sent to you, and add attachments as you normally would. There is a 35MB limit per email, so you may need to send multiple emails with attachments. This is perfectly acceptable.
Please also note that the encrypted email AUTO-DELETES after 30 days. If you do not submit your documentation within 30 days, the practice advisor will send you a new encrypted email so that you can reply to this and submit your documentation.
Finally, the College is unable to accept mailed documentation. Please do not mail 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 College advisor
In order 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.
The type, and amount, of documents we are asking for will be clearly laid out in the original encrypted email sent by your practice advisor. Please review this carefully. This will differ depending on whether you are a pharmacy technician, community pharmacist, hospital pharmacist, LTC pharmacist or FHT pharmacist. The purpose of asking for a variety of different patient cases is so that the practice advisor is able to get a good picture of the breadth of your practice and the types of drug therapy problems you manage.
What is a Drug Therapy Problem (DTP)?
A drug therapy problem (DTP) is an event or circumstance involving drug treatment that interferes with the optimization of pharmaceutical care (L.M. Strand and colleagues, 1990). These are often broken down into seven categories, grouped into four pharmacotherapy needs: Indication, Effectiveness, Safety and Use (or adherence) – IESU/IESA (Cipolle, Robert (1998). Pharmaceutical Care Practice. Mc Graw Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-175638-9.).
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- Unnecessary drug therapy
- Wrong Drug
- Dose too low
- Dose too high
- Adverse drug reaction
- Inappropriate adherence
- Need additional drug therapy
Strand LM, Morley PC, Cipolle RJ, Ramsey R, Lamsam GD (1990). “Drug-related problems: their structure and function”. DICP. 24 (11): 1093–7. doi:10.1177/106002809002401114. PMID 2275235.
We realize that every practice is unique, so if there are any special services that you provide, or specific cases you would like to share, please let your practice advisor know and be sure to include these. If there is any reason you cannot provide certain types of documentation, please also discuss with your practice advisor.
The most important thing to consider is that we are trying to understand your thought process. Please choose examples, when you can, when you had to solve a drug therapy problem for a patient. This will allow us to ask you questions about how you optimize care for your patients.
For each patient case you send, please also include a summary of the patient profile (relevant list of current medications) for ease of discussion and review.
Sending a SUMMARY of the types/amount of documentation you sent in the body of the encrypted email to your advisor will allow them to ensure they have received all of the documentation you attached as well.
If you have further questions around your documentation submission, please contact your advisor directly.
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.
All documents submitted to the practice advisor for the purposes 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