Ready or not? Pharmacist perceptions of a changing injection scope of practice before it happens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Since 2012, Ontario pharmacists have been authorized to administer the influenza vaccine. In April 2016, the Ontario College of Pharmacists (OCP) proposed to expand the Pharmacy Act to allow pharmacists to vaccinate against 13 additional conditions. The OCP held an online public consultation and invited pharmacists, members of the public and organizations to weigh in on the proposed changes. Our objective was to explore the factors influencing how Ontario pharmacists may adopt or reject an expanding scope of practice, using data from the public consultation. METHODS: We coded the responses to the public consultation in 2 ways: 1) sentiment analysis and 2) an integrative approach to coding using Rogers's diffusion of innovations theory across 5 domains: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability. RESULTS: Responses from pharmacists, the public and organizations were moderately positive on average. Pharmacists most commonly mentioned relative advantages, including benefits for patients, pharmacists, physicians and the health system. Positive responses focused on accessibility for patients, improved vaccine coverage, lower health care spending and freed physician time but cited lack of prescribing privileges as a barrier to the proposed changes. Negative responses focused on increased workload, patient safety concerns and the complexity of travel medicine. CONCLUSIONS: The expanded immunization services are likely to be well received by most pharmacists. Convenience and accessibility for patients were commonly cited benefits, but the changes will be only a slight improvement over the current system unless pharmacists can prescribe these vaccines. Although employers responded positively, the question remains whether they will support pharmacists in a way that aligns with pharmacists' values and expectations. Decision makers must pay close attention to the pharmacy infrastructure and how this will affect uptake of these services. Recognition of this, combined with pharmacists' positive perceptions of the expanded scope, will facilitate smooth integration of this legislation into Ontario pharmacy practice.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".