In a society where people are busy and have little time to care for themselves, pharmacists may have a larger role to play in helping plan members stay healthy, said Angelo Tsebelis, director of payor partnerships at Shoppers Drug Mart and Loblaw Companies Ltd.
At the 2016 Healthy Outcomes conference in Toronto on June 10, Tsebelis noted the growing concern about workloads as an impediment to accessing health care. Citing the 2015 Sanofi Canada health-care survey, he noted 19 per cent of plan members claim their workload has caused them to cancel or reschedule appointments with healthcare professionals, a number that climbs to almost one-third among those in poor health.
Tsebelis, citing the large number of Canadians who don’t have a family physician, said that when people do get sick, it can be difficult for them to access immediate care through a doctor.
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“We feel that there’s an opportunity for pharmacists to step in and absorb some of that pressure,” he said, explaining that pharmacists are accessible and can see plan members quickly.
Tsebelis spoke about adherence as an example of where pharmacists can help by reaching out to people who are late in renewing their prescriptions and offering counselling on the importance of taking medication as prescribed. In the case of Shoppers Drug Mart, it saw an almost 30 per cent reduction in the average number of days people were late in filling their prescriptions.
“What’s not clear is that as a system, whether it’s public or private, we pay for the physicians to diagnose the problem, we pay for the treatment and we pay for the drugs, then we don’t do anything really to ensure they’re taking their drugs. But we pay for the downstream effects,” said Tsebelis.
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