Pharmacy Corner
RESOURCES FOR PHARMACY

As part of our ongoing support of Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical Partners of Canada Inc. is proud to bring you a special in-depth interview with David Hill, Executive Director of the Canadian Council for Accreditation of Pharmacy Programs.

These programs represent an important step forward for pharmacy technicians, and for the profession as a whole.

As the role of pharmacists evolves towards providing clinical care and overseeing drug therapy, pharmacy technicians will be able to step up to the important task of dispensing medications. But in order for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to expand their scopes of practice within our healthcare system there must be the assurance that pharmacy technicians are well trained to take more responsibility for traditional dispensing duties. This requires a national standard of regulation that would hold pharmacy technicians to a uniform standard, and allow them to expand their scope of practice to include many of the duties now assigned to pharmacists.

David Hill, Executive Director of the Canadian Council for Accreditation of Pharmacy Programs (CCAPP), worked to establish a much needed national accreditation system for the training programs for pharmacy technicians. We spoke to him recently to discuss the challenges and opportunities of this important initiative.

Dr. Hill, what was behind this move towards the national accreditation of pharmacy technician training programs?

“Accreditation is the measure of the quality of college training programs on a national level. Educators wanted an accreditation program to bring some order to how the education of pharmacy technicians was occurring across the country. Each province had their own standards, and indeed each college had their own standards, but there was no national standard for good quality pharmacy technician education programs.”

“I’ve heard community pharmacists say that a good pharmacy technician can make or break a business. But until now it’s been somewhat of a crapshoot for pharmacists when they hire pharmacy technicians as to whether they’re going to be any good. When a hospital or a pharmacy chain needs a pharmacist, they know that grads from Dalhousie, the University of Alberta or BC are all going to be equally competent, but we don’t have that level of confidence with pharmacy technician graduates. What you end up with is a pharmacy group or a hospital saying ‘We will only take graduates from this program, but not from that program.’ So you’ve got a huge educational resource out there producing graduates for which the profession has very little assurance that they’re all competent. As the accrediting body, CCAPP is trying to bring every program body to a convergence of predictable quality.”

Continue to part two...