The lack of consistency is a huge area of frustration to the profession because, depending on where you're practising, you're able to do things...and the funding and support to be able to offer the services that we are capable of giving to our patients is limited. There's a huge opportunity for us to rethink what health care looks like.
When you enter the doors of a pharmacy, you're not just entering the doors to see your pharmacist. You're entering the doors to Canada's health care system. I think there needs to be a shift to incorporating pharmacists into the greater health care system, and rethinking how we can utilize our skills and our knowledge in collaboration with the other health care providers and the other systems in place so that we're not only being efficient, but we're also being effective.
Right now, there's no way of showing the impact that pharmacists' interventions have on the prevention of hospital room visits. We want to be able to triage patients and make sure we catch their conditions. We want to make sure their health conditions are managed early on, not later on, when the implications are.... As we heard earlier on, the delay in treatment, or even in identifying therapy, has severe consequences for the patient and for the health care system.
So leveraging pharmacists is a really smart thing to do, and it's what we want to do. We want to provide care. But I will say that the system needs to be supportive of that. That includes funding and that includes a reduced administrative burden. There are so many barriers or system constraints that prevent us from being able to deliver the care that we want to and that we're capable of doing.