Results of a National Survey on OTC Medicines, Part 2: Do Pharmacists Support Switching Prescription Agents to Over-the-Counter Status?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Switching prescribed medications to over- or behind-the-counter status is considered an option to improve accessibility to treatment while insuring appropriate and safe use. For example, in the UK, omeprazole and simvastatin have already been granted over-the-counter (OTC) status, while omeprazole has nonprescription status in the USA. KEY POINTS Pharmacists in Canada do not support the deregulation of simvastatin or omeprazole and only moderately support an OTC switch for fluticasone. The complexity of disease and drug management was listed as the main barrier to OTC switch. Additional training was perceived as a facilitator of OTC switch. Other issues included access to laboratory test results, liability issues and loss of drug plan coverage POINTS CLES Les pharmaciens ne sont pas en faveur de la dereglementation de la simvastatine ou de l'omeprazole et ne sont que moderement en faveur de la mise en vente libre du fluticasone. La complexite de la maladie et de la prise en charge pharmaceutique a ete citee comme principal motif d'opposition a la mise en vente libre. On estime qu'une formation supplementaire serait necessaire pour faciliter le reclassement du produit parmi les medicaments en vente libre. Parmi les autres questions soulevees, mentionnons l'acces aux resultats d'analyses de laboratoire, les questions de responsabilite et le retrait du regime d'assurance-medicaments. In Canada, switching prescribed medications to OTC status (Schedule II) can have major implications for pharmacists. The level of care required to ensure safe selection and use may be quite significant. To date, few reports in Canada have dealt with pharmacists' readiness to expand practice in this area. Indeed, some concern has been expressed over the ability of pharmacists to engage in more patient assessment.1 In this paper, we explore pharmacists' readiness for switching simvastatin, omeprazole and fluticasone to Schedule II status. We also identify the barriers and facilitators for such a switch.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".