Community Pharmacists’ Expanding Roles In Supporting Patients Before And During COVID-19: An Exploratory Qualitative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background: Timely access and attachment to a primary healthcare provider is essential for population health outcomes. Patients without a family physician or nurse practitioner (“unattached”) or who cannot access their provider when needed may seek care from a community pharmacist. Community pharmacists are highly accessible in Canada and have a broad scope of practice. During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, community pharmacists took on additional roles. However, little is known about how community pharmacists managed the needs of unattached versus attached patients before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.Aim: To explore Nova Scotian community pharmacists’ roles in caring for patients before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and identifying barriers and facilitators to optimizing patient access.Method: Semi-structured interviews with community pharmacists across the province of Nova Scotia (Canada) were conducted. Data were analyzed using framework analysis.Results: Eleven community pharmacists were interviewed. Five key themes were noted: 1) rising pressure on pharmacists to meet unique health needs; 2) what pharmacists have to offer; 3) positioning pharmacists in the system; 4) pharmacist wellbeing; and 5) recommendations for practice post-pandemic.Conclusion: Before and during the pandemic, community pharmacists played a significant and increasing role in providing care to patients, especially unattached patients. With the growing number of unattached patients, it is vital community pharmacists are supported to provide additional services to care for the health needs of patients.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".