Unpacking the value of pharmacists in team-based primary care in British Columbia, Canada: a qualitative evaluation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The pharmacy profession has been continuously evolving, redefining pharmacists' scope of practice within various practice settings to meet the ongoing societal needs, demands and patient expectations. Pharmacists are increasingly becoming part of primary care teams in countries such as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In British Columbia, Canada, primary care clinical pharmacists (PCCPs) were incorporated into developing primary care networks (PCNs) over a three-year period. Our project aimed to gain insight into how the role of PCCPs is perceived by their interprofessional team (IPT) members in addition to how the pharmacists themselves view their contribution to team-based primary care. METHODS: This project was conducted as part of the evaluation of the Pharmacists in PCN Program and was informed by Qualitative Description methodology. Data was collected at two time points during program implementation. Participants included program team members, PCCPs and PCN members (administrators, IPT members, and prescribers) who were invited via e-mail to participant in virtual individual interviews and focus groups. RESULTS: Prescribers and PCN IPT members felt supported when collaborating with PCCPs for the shared care of mutual patients. Additionally, PCCPs believed that team members valued their role. There was a recognized need for PCCPs to be co-located in clinics as efficient, reliable, and accessible team members owing to their role in medication management, offering patient-centred recommendations and follow-up care plans to optimize medication regimens, providing patient education which empowers patients to advocate for their health needs, prioritizing patient autonomy, decreasing the amount of time prescribers and IPT members spend on complex patients, and supporting patients who do not have immediate access to a family physician. CONCLUSION: Perceptions of the PCCP's contribution to IPTs were overwhelmingly positive. The PCCP's specific role in addressing aspects of patient care that other health care providers may overlook, and their possession of knowledge, expertise, and skills which fall outside other team members' scope of work has led to their recognition as an essential team member. However, more research is needed to look beyond the pharmacist's impact on providing longitudinal medication management, as perceived by all members of the primary care team.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".