Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Phil Emberley. I'm the director of pharmacy innovation at the Canadian Pharmacists Association and also a practising pharmacist. CPhA represents over 35,000 Canadian pharmacists from coast to coast, practising in community and hospital pharmacies, family practice clinics, industry, and other settings.
I'm joined today by my colleague and peer, Mr. Mark Barnes, who is a pharmacist, owner, and VP of business development and public relations of a pharmacy in Ottawa that provides treatment to patients addicted to opiates. In a couple of minutes, Mark will share with you the services he provides, as well as the impact he has on his clients.
As front-line health professionals, pharmacists see first-hand the devastating impact of prescription drug abuse—in particular, opioid painkillers—as it shatters careers, relationships, and indeed lives. Many patients who become addicted to opioids start them as prescribed therapy for an actual ailment.
Ensuring access to pain medications for patients who have legitimate needs while working to prevent misuse, abuse, and diversion of opioids is a complex balancing act for prescribers and pharmacists. There are no easy answers to mitigating the prescription drug abuse problem in Canada. However, pharmacists can play an important role in helping patients to avoid the pitfalls of prescription drug abuse and in providing treatment for those who are addicted to opiate medications.
But there also remain areas where further work and efforts must be addressed. First and foremost, pharmacists want to do what is best for the health of their patients, and their goal is to steer patients away from harmful situations such as prescription drug abuse. As drug experts, pharmacists fully understand how drugs work and how addictions occur, including the factors that lead to medication abuse and misuse.
In recent years, provincial governments have expanded the professional scope of pharmacists. In most jurisdictions, pharmacists can now provide medication reviews to their patients. A medication review allows pharmacists to become more familiar with a patient's diagnoses, the indication for treatment, and their response to medication.
This service can also be used to flag potentially problematic medication use, as well as to provide an opportunity to better educate patients on how to take their medication safely. For example, stopping some narcotics abruptly can cause harm to patients and even lead to emergency room visits in some cases. Medication reviews are an ideal setting for pharmacists to educate patients on how to safely stop a medication.
The CPhA recommends that all jurisdictions, including the federal government, as a provider of health services, support pharmacist medication review programs.
The Canadian Pharmacists Association is also an accredited provider of continuing education. While there is medical, nursing, and pharmacy training that educates to optimize the prescribing of psychoactive drugs, there is an opportunity to do much more. Health providers need better education in order to weigh the risks and benefits of opioid treatment and in order to educate patients on the safe use of these medications.
Health professionals also need to be able to recognize evidence of and potential for the misuse of these medications. National and inter-professional education programs need to be developed that ensure all health care providers are fully up to date on the current treatment regiments for chronic pain and mental health disorders.
I'll now pass the floor over to Mark, who will describe some of his experiences with patients who have problems with prescription drugs.