Immunization programs: The Role of Pharmacists in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: In 2009, pharmacists in British Columbia were given the right to become certified in vaccine-administration. While the uptake of this new activity was impressive, there is still a need to better understand current and expected involvement of pharmacists in immunization activities. Our objective was to identify pharmacist and pharmacy characteristics associated with being certified to immunize. METHODS: The cover letter and web-link to a 42-item survey was emailed to British Columbia Pharmacy Association (BCPhA) registered pharmacists. Consent was provided electronically. Respondents’ demographic and practice site characteristics were summarized with descriptive statistics. Multivariate logistic regression was used to examine pharmacist and pharmacy characteristics associated with being certified to administer. FINDINGS: The current analysis was restricted to community pharmacists (n=551) of the 663 pharmacists who responded. Overall, 71.3% (393/551) of respondents were certified to administer. The most commonly provided vaccine was influenza (464 [84.4%]). The majority (445[80.8%]) were also interested in administering non-vaccine injectables. Pharmacists who had been in practice for fewer years were more likely to be certified. Job position was related to certification; both managers and owners were more likely than staff to be certified. With respect to pharmacy type, chain and foodstore pharmacies were both more likely than independent pharmacies to employ certified pharmacists. CONCLUSION: The majority of community pharmacists are involved in immunizations and this involvement is associated with specific pharmacist and pharmacy characteristics. This information can be used to better encourage more pharmacists to become immunizers. KEYWORDS: Pharmacists, vaccination, primary prevention, community health services.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".