I want to acknowledge that today I'm speaking to you from the traditional territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam first nations.
The COVID pandemic has shown both the weaknesses in our health care system and the resilience of our health care providers, who have worked for the last two years to meet the unprecedented demands the pandemic has placed on them. It is clear that the federal and provincial governments must renew their commitment to providing the support needed to ensure that Canada has the physicians, nurses and other health care providers ready to face another health crisis of similar magnitude should it come.
The B.C. Pharmacy Association applauds the work of this committee in pursuing much-needed opportunities to recruit and retain a diverse team of health care professionals across Canada.
Today, I want to share the perspective from my province of British Columbia on the resilience that community pharmacists have demonstrated.
As committee members will well know, B.C. has been particularly hard hit since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. This health emergency was layered on top of B.C.'s other public health emergency—the opioid crisis. Added to that, our province faced a once-in-a-lifetime set of wildfires, heat domes and catastrophic flooding. All of that has added to the stress on the province's health care system. It is a testament to every health care worker in our province that despite the cascade of obstacles, people in communities big and small received the care they needed.
We all know that health care workers have paid the price. They are spent, and they need to know that their governments will put plans in place to make them better able to meet the next crisis. A key part of that preparation is the work of this committee—recruitment and retention of health care professionals.
When B.C. went into a public health state of emergency in March 2020, which included a lockdown on all but essential services, pharmacies were the only community care settings that patients were able to access in person. Pharmacists quickly pivoted to ensure that they met the needs of their patients.
B.C. has more than 1,400 community pharmacies in 158 communities across the province, and nearly every community has a pharmacy within a 30-minute drive. Pharmacies have long served as an important point of first contact for patients seeking medical care. A 2018 review showed that community pharmacists see their patients anywhere between 1.5 and 10 times more frequently than their primary care physicians, and we know that this number has skyrocketed over the last two years. This has meant that more and more patients are calling on their pharmacist to answer questions and to fill in the gaps of in-person care.
In a 2021 national survey, 90% of Canadians said that pharmacy professionals and pharmacies were essential during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three in four Canadians said that pharmacists played a larger role in providing health care services than before the pandemic. In that same survey, 93% of Canadians would trust pharmacists to be the first point of contact in the health care system.
While community pharmacists fill a number of critical roles, there is much more that pharmacists can and should be doing, but unfortunately pharmacists' scope of practice varies greatly from province to province, leaving a patchwork of coverage and patients in different jurisdictions unable to receive the same access to care.
In six provinces and one territory, pharmacists have the ability to prescribe for self-limiting conditions like cold sores and acne. These self-limiting ailments are easy to treat and self-identifiable by the patient. In our view, a national scope of practice for pharmacists should be adopted that ensures all pharmacists are able to deliver the same care at their maximum level of expertise, and this would include prescribing rights. This is particularly important in rural and remote communities that continue to have difficulties in attracting physicians and other health care providers. Allowing pharmacists to practise at their full scope will help patients and those providers already struggling under the pressure of providing care.
Governments have long struggled to harness the expertise of community pharmacists and to leverage the expansive network of community pharmacies. The pandemic has provided opportunities for pharmacists to show that the potential exists. In B.C., pharmacists have been critical in delivering COVID-19 vaccines.
We believe that the federal government should target funding to the provinces that would be used to improve and harmonize a standard scope of practice across the country. We recommend that this committee create a forum of engagement with the Canadian Pharmacists Association and other provincial pharmacy associations to develop a strategy to fully employ the expertise of community pharmacists.