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Pharmacy response to COVID-19: lessons learnt from Canada
When the first wave of COVID-19 hit in March 2020, health care professionals across Canada were challenged to quickly and efficiently adapt to change their work practices in these unprecedented times. Pharmacy professionals, being some of the very few front-line health care workers who remained acce...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7724456/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33298184 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40545-020-00280-w |
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author | Elbeddini, Ali Botross, Amy Gerochi, Rachel Gazarin, Mohamed Elshahawi, Ahmed |
author_facet | Elbeddini, Ali Botross, Amy Gerochi, Rachel Gazarin, Mohamed Elshahawi, Ahmed |
author_sort | Elbeddini, Ali |
collection | PubMed |
description | When the first wave of COVID-19 hit in March 2020, health care professionals across Canada were challenged to quickly and efficiently adapt to change their work practices in these unprecedented times. Pharmacy professionals, being some of the very few front-line health care workers who remained accessible in person for patients, had to rapidly adopt critical changes in their pharmacies to respond in the best interest of their patients and their pharmacy staff. As challenging and demanding as such changes were, they provided pharmacists with invaluable lessons that would be imperative as the country enters a potentially more dangerous second wave. This article seeks to identify and summarize opportunities for improvement in pharmacy as learnt from the pandemic’s first wave. Such areas include but are not limited to handling of drug shortage and addressing drug hoarding and stockpiling, providing physical and mental support for staff, timing of flu vaccine and COVID-19 screening/testing, collaboration between different health care sites as well as collaboration with patients and with other health care professionals, telemedicine and willingness to adopt innovative ideas, need for more staff training and more precise research to provide accurate information and finally the need for more organizational and workplace support. Learning from what went well and what did not work in the early stages of the pandemic is integral to ensure pharmacy professionals are better prepared to protect themselves and their patients amidst a second and possibly subsequent waves. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7724456 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-77244562020-12-09 Pharmacy response to COVID-19: lessons learnt from Canada Elbeddini, Ali Botross, Amy Gerochi, Rachel Gazarin, Mohamed Elshahawi, Ahmed J Pharm Policy Pract Commentary When the first wave of COVID-19 hit in March 2020, health care professionals across Canada were challenged to quickly and efficiently adapt to change their work practices in these unprecedented times. Pharmacy professionals, being some of the very few front-line health care workers who remained accessible in person for patients, had to rapidly adopt critical changes in their pharmacies to respond in the best interest of their patients and their pharmacy staff. As challenging and demanding as such changes were, they provided pharmacists with invaluable lessons that would be imperative as the country enters a potentially more dangerous second wave. This article seeks to identify and summarize opportunities for improvement in pharmacy as learnt from the pandemic’s first wave. Such areas include but are not limited to handling of drug shortage and addressing drug hoarding and stockpiling, providing physical and mental support for staff, timing of flu vaccine and COVID-19 screening/testing, collaboration between different health care sites as well as collaboration with patients and with other health care professionals, telemedicine and willingness to adopt innovative ideas, need for more staff training and more precise research to provide accurate information and finally the need for more organizational and workplace support. Learning from what went well and what did not work in the early stages of the pandemic is integral to ensure pharmacy professionals are better prepared to protect themselves and their patients amidst a second and possibly subsequent waves. BioMed Central 2020-12-09 /pmc/articles/PMC7724456/ /pubmed/33298184 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40545-020-00280-w Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Commentary Elbeddini, Ali Botross, Amy Gerochi, Rachel Gazarin, Mohamed Elshahawi, Ahmed Pharmacy response to COVID-19: lessons learnt from Canada |
title | Pharmacy response to COVID-19: lessons learnt from Canada |
title_full | Pharmacy response to COVID-19: lessons learnt from Canada |
title_fullStr | Pharmacy response to COVID-19: lessons learnt from Canada |
title_full_unstemmed | Pharmacy response to COVID-19: lessons learnt from Canada |
title_short | Pharmacy response to COVID-19: lessons learnt from Canada |
title_sort | pharmacy response to covid-19: lessons learnt from canada |
topic | Commentary |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7724456/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33298184 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40545-020-00280-w |
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