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Shooting from the ‘Scrip: Scope of Practice Laws and Access to Immunizations in the Pharmacy Setting
In the past two decades, most states in the United States have added authorization for pharmacists to administer some vaccinations. Expansions of this authority have also come with prescription requirements or other regulatory burdens. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of these...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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MDPI
2021
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8147434/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34063185 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vaccines9050444 |
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author | Stoecker, Charles |
author_facet | Stoecker, Charles |
author_sort | Stoecker, Charles |
collection | PubMed |
description | In the past two decades, most states in the United States have added authorization for pharmacists to administer some vaccinations. Expansions of this authority have also come with prescription requirements or other regulatory burdens. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of these expansions on influenza immunization rates in adults age 65 and over. A panel data, differences-in-differences regression framework to control for state-level unobserved confounders and shocks at the national level was used on a combination of a dataset of state-level statute and regulatory changes and influenza immunization data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Giving pharmacists permission to vaccinate had a positive impact on adult influenza immunization rates of 1.4 percentage points for adults age 65 and over. This effect was diminished by the presence of laws requiring pharmacists to obtain patient-specific prescriptions. There was no evidence that allowing pharmacists to administer vaccinations led patients to have fewer annual check-ups with physicians or not have a usual source of health care. Expanding pharmacists’ scope of practice laws to include administering the influenza vaccine had a positive impact on influenza shot uptake. This may have implications for relaxing restrictions on other forms of care that could be provided by pharmacists. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8147434 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-81474342021-05-26 Shooting from the ‘Scrip: Scope of Practice Laws and Access to Immunizations in the Pharmacy Setting Stoecker, Charles Vaccines (Basel) Article In the past two decades, most states in the United States have added authorization for pharmacists to administer some vaccinations. Expansions of this authority have also come with prescription requirements or other regulatory burdens. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of these expansions on influenza immunization rates in adults age 65 and over. A panel data, differences-in-differences regression framework to control for state-level unobserved confounders and shocks at the national level was used on a combination of a dataset of state-level statute and regulatory changes and influenza immunization data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Giving pharmacists permission to vaccinate had a positive impact on adult influenza immunization rates of 1.4 percentage points for adults age 65 and over. This effect was diminished by the presence of laws requiring pharmacists to obtain patient-specific prescriptions. There was no evidence that allowing pharmacists to administer vaccinations led patients to have fewer annual check-ups with physicians or not have a usual source of health care. Expanding pharmacists’ scope of practice laws to include administering the influenza vaccine had a positive impact on influenza shot uptake. This may have implications for relaxing restrictions on other forms of care that could be provided by pharmacists. MDPI 2021-05-02 /pmc/articles/PMC8147434/ /pubmed/34063185 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vaccines9050444 Text en © 2021 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Stoecker, Charles Shooting from the ‘Scrip: Scope of Practice Laws and Access to Immunizations in the Pharmacy Setting |
title | Shooting from the ‘Scrip: Scope of Practice Laws and Access to Immunizations in the Pharmacy Setting |
title_full | Shooting from the ‘Scrip: Scope of Practice Laws and Access to Immunizations in the Pharmacy Setting |
title_fullStr | Shooting from the ‘Scrip: Scope of Practice Laws and Access to Immunizations in the Pharmacy Setting |
title_full_unstemmed | Shooting from the ‘Scrip: Scope of Practice Laws and Access to Immunizations in the Pharmacy Setting |
title_short | Shooting from the ‘Scrip: Scope of Practice Laws and Access to Immunizations in the Pharmacy Setting |
title_sort | shooting from the ‘scrip: scope of practice laws and access to immunizations in the pharmacy setting |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8147434/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34063185 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vaccines9050444 |
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