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.
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 OCP, you should keep a record of the patient’s name for your own use.
When you first receive the encrypted email from the College’s OCP Documentation email, you will be asked to create an email encryption account with a username and password; details on how to do so will be provided in the email. Once you have created this account, you are able to log in at any time.
For all of 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.
These 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.
Compressed files are not permitted.
You will not have the ability to compose a new email in the encrypted account. In order to submit your documents, you must reply to the encrypted email and attach your documents. When completing the submission:
- Include your full name and OCP number in the email subject line.
- Send one example per email.
- It is recommended that your attachments in one email add up to less than 10 MB.
- Send all of your documents in on the same day.
After submitting all of your documents, please send a separate email listing the examples you have submitted and the number of pages for each example so this can be reconciled.
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 College practice 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