Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Demand for care in the primary healthcare setting has been extremely stretched. To ease the pressure off a strained healthcare system, a new minor ailment prescribing service was launched in community pharmacies across Ontario. Data gathered by our team showed close to eight million emergency room visits in 2018 for conditions that are otherwise self-limiting and could be managed in the primary care setting. These data provided a foundation for decision making related to the approved conditions for minor ailment prescribing by community pharmacists. This new service was launched on January 1st 2023, allowing pharmacists to initially prescribe for thirteen approved minor ailments which are defined as "health conditions that can be managed with minimal treatment and/or self-care strategies". As of October 2023, this service has been expanded to allow pharmacists to prescribe for an additional six minor ailments, with over 400,000 minor ailment consultations being carried out in community pharmacies across Ontario. Despite the existence of similar programs in other Canadian jurisdictions, there is current debate within the healthcare community and public discourse pertaining largely to prescribing safety and hesitancy around service provision by pharmacists. To ensure that the needs of patients are met and that the service provides overall benefit to the health system, it is imperative to conduct a robust evaluation of this new service. Such evaluations can be qualitative (end user experience), quantitative (uptake and drug use) or process evaluations. Equally, we need to ensure that the service meets the quintuple aim. Our study aims to is to engage with a wide variety of stakeholders, policymakers, patients, medical professionals, and pharmacy champions to determine and design the most optimal evaluation of the minor ailment service. Findings from this study may be useful to the consulted groups and for future enhancement of the minor ailment service in Ontario.