Competency Assessment of Pharmacists Providing Emergency Contraception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs; levonorgestrel or combination oral contraceptives) are used in unique regimens soon after failed contraception or unprotected intercourse to prevent pregnancy. Prompt access to these products is important, as efficacy diminishes with time since intercourse. The availability of EC from pharmacists (either as prescribed Schedule F products or via a rescheduling to Schedule II pharmacist-supervised sale) would greatly increase access. In Saskatchewan, pharmacists have received independent prescribing authority for ECPs. This article describes the process for assessing competency to prescribe EC in that province. A faculty of pharmacy developed a workshop to educate pharmacists about emergency contraceptive products, their mechanism of action, the necessary assessment and documentation processes, ethical issues related to emergency contraception, and counselling techniques. It also offered participants an opportunity to explore a variety of clinical cases in small groups. Participants completed a test before and after the training and were required to attain a score of 80% or greater on the latter test to become certified to prescribe. The average scores on the pre- and post-training tests were 14.4/25 (57.6%) and 22.1/26 (85.0%), respectively ( p < 0.05). Over a series of three workshops, 17.2% of Saskatchewan's 1182 pharmacists became certified to prescribe ECPs. The workshop was offered again in June and September 2003, in anticipation of the September 1, 2003, legislative changes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".