Pharmacist direct dispensing of mifepristone for medication abortion in Canada: a survey of community pharmacists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Pharmacists were acknowledged as the most appropriate healthcare professional to dispense mifepristone for medication abortion shortly after the prescription therapy became available in January 2017 in Canada. Objective We aimed to identify the facilitators and barriers for successful initiation and ongoing dispensing of mifepristone among community pharmacists across Canada. Study design We surveyed community pharmacists from urban/rural practice settings across Canada by recruiting from January 2017 to January 2019 through pharmacist organisations, professional networks, at mifepristone training courses and at professional conferences. The Diffusion of Innovations theory informed the study design, thematic analysis and interpretation of findings. We summarised categorical data using counts and proportions, χ 2 tests, Wilcoxon rank-sum and proportional odds logistic regression. Results Of the 433 responses from dispensing community pharmacists across 10/13 Canadian provinces and territories, 93.1% indicated they were willing and ready to dispense mifepristone. Key facilitators were access to a private consultation setting (91.4%), the motivation to increase accessibility for patients (87.5%) and to reduce pressure on the healthcare system (75.3%). The cost of the mifepristone/misoprostol product was an initial barrier, subsequently resolved by universal government subsidy. A few pharmacists mentioned liability, lack of prescribers or inadequate stock as barriers. Conclusions Pharmacist respondents from across Canada reported being able and willing to dispense mifepristone and rarely mentioned barriers to stocking/dispensing the medication in the community pharmacy setting. The removal of initial regulatory obstacles to directly dispense mifepristone to patients facilitated the provision of medication abortion in the primary care setting.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".