Pharmacy-led primary care clinics off to a strong start in N.S., pharmacy group says

Pharmacists participating in Nova Scotia’s new Community Pharmacy Primary Care Clinics are happy with how it’s been going, says Allison Bodnar, The Pharmacy Association of Nova Scotia CEO. “I was at a couple of the grand openings yesterday, and team members came up to me and said, ‘This is a dream come true. This is what I went to pharmacy school to do. I’ve been waiting for this for 10 years,’” said Bodnar. Twelve pharmacies are participating in the pilot program, and a dozen more clinics will open in May. Bodnar says she’s hopeful that all 318 pharmacy teams will eventually be working this way. The pharmacists in those clinics can assess and prescribe for diseases like shingles, medication changes, birth control, and allergies, as well as offer care for chronic diseases like diabetes, injection and immunization services, and mental health issues. The provincial government covers the cost for people with a provincial health card. It’s meant to ease the strain created by the lack of physicians: The province has nearly 130,000 people on a waitlist for a family doctor. Read: Nova Scotia will not meet its pledge to reduce surgical backlog by February Shoppers Drug Mart president Jeff Leger said that nearly 500 patients had visited their clinics the first week they were open. “These results demonstrate an obvious need for services and that when given access, people will use them,” Leger said in a press release. They opened on Feb. 1 to good demand from the public. “We have been busy right from day one,” Terry Higgins, owner of a Shoppers Drug Mart Sydney, said to The Chronicle Herald. “I would say we’ve done, probably because of the time of the year, the season, there have been a lot of respiratory tract and strep throat assessments; not all of which are positive for strep, many are viral. That has been a big one.” Alvin Thompkins, the owner of a Shoppers Drug Mart in Halifax, told Global News that they’ve been treating up to 30 patients a day. He said many were children with strep, and adults were mostly prescription renewals, and that the other pharmacies he knows that are participating in the pilot project have done well. “Everyone I talk to, everybody has had a lot of success,” he says. Read: Nova Scotia emergency room deaths up 10% in 2022, data shows

Pharmacy-led primary care clinics off to a strong start in N.S., pharmacy group says

Register for free access or login.

Related Topics