The Ontario Pharmacist Association is urging policy change when it comes to schedule 2 vaccines for seniors

Well, if you are 55 or older or care for someone in that above that age bracket, this next guest may be helpful to you. Jen Belcher is a pharmacist who joins me this morning with an interesting topic that some people might not think about. We're talking about schedule 2 vaccines and the barriers surrounding it. So first of all, talk to people about what is a schedule 2 vaccine. So schedule 2 vaccine is a vaccine that you don't actually need a prescription for. So that's kind of like an over the counter product or behind the counter product. Say you need an iron supplement. You go into your pharmacy, you talk to the pharmacist and they go, you know what? This is really what I'd recommend for you, but you don't need a prescription in order to buy it. You can just get that without a prescription from the pharmacist. Some vaccines are like that. So when we think about the shingles vaccine, for example, that's one that you don't actually require a prescription for. You can have one, but you don't need one in order to be able to get that from your pharmacy. So what kind of barriers are there when it comes to these schedule 2 vaccines? The biggest one is really payment, in all honesty. So because as a pharmacist, I can recommend a vaccine, but I can't actually prescribe it. It's not in my authorities or my scope of practice to the pharmacist to write out a prescription that's recognized as a prescription. So with that, many drug plans don't actually recognize my recommendation as a prescription or reason to cover that under the drug plan. So someone might have a drug plan that covers the shingles vaccine. If they went to their doctor or nurse and got a prescription for it, their drug plan would pay their portion if the pharmacist recommends it. Unfortunately, in many cases that that product won't be funded in the same way. So that's one of those barriers because vaccines can be expensive. And when you have a drug plan that covers it, you should be able to use it regardless of who's recommending that vaccine for you. Yeah, it causes a bit of an issue too, because a lot of people in Kingston, for instance, don't have a family doctor that they can just ring up and go to. Absolutely. And even with that, with how overworked our family doctors are in terms of providing care to so many people, where the pharmacist has the education, skills, training and expertise to recommend and, and provide that product. Do we need to be sending people off on another appointment where maybe they have to take time off of work? Maybe that's a time slot that that doctor could be taking care of somebody who's diabetes medications need changed or so forth. So it's really about the appropriate use of all of the people we have within the team to make the best use of our skills and, and try and make the system work more functionally and have more of that capacity. Now you're the VP of the Ontario Pharmacist Association, So what have you heard from fellow colleagues about this? This is something that we've actually been asking for. So there's the clarity around the payment piece that, you know, our drug plan should recognize the pharmacist recommendation that if you pay for the vaccine, if it's prescribed, you should pay for it. If it's recommended by the pharmacist, there's that. But there's the bigger piece that we've been asking for at the association for quite some time, and that's with about 75% of Ontarians choosing pharmacies for their COVID and their flu vaccines to let us be prescribers for all vaccines. The process of determining whether or not to give it to somebody and to administer it through an injection and whether or not to prescribe it is exceptionally similar that as well. There are some vaccines that are covered by our province that the province pays for. And those right now, you can really only get through places like family physicians offices, our public health unit, emergency rooms, for example. And we want to be added to that group of providers so that if you need, for example, to get your tetanus booster every 10 years or you need to get your shingle shot between the ages of 65 and 70 when it's paid for that it doesn't mean you have to go somewhere else when you're already with us getting your flu or your COVID vaccine. So we've been asking that for quite some time. We're still waiting on those changes to be made by the Ontario government to allow pharmacists to prescribe and to provide publicly funded vaccines beyond COVID and flu. But we are hopeful with the number of people who look to us as their vaccinator that we'll be able to move the needle on that. And have you gotten any update on on this policy change from them? So we don't have any updates currently, but it has been a long standing advocacy ask and there is that recognition especially coming out of the pandemic that Ontarians want their vaccines from pharmacy and that we are a safe, appropriate and effective place to get them. And more recently, pharmacists have been given other things that they can do, right, absolutely that we're we're assessing and prescribing for a lot of things now. And we're hopeful to see that scope expand even further so we can take more, take care of more people with those common ailments. But that program has been extraordinarily successful, especially in some of those really, you know, acute and uncomfortable conditions like urinary tract infections, some of the seasonal allergies that we're seeing right now. I, you know, suffer them for myself and so does my child to the ability to be able to be seen by a pharmacist when we don't have family doctors to be treated appropriately has really been something that's been very well received by our public and and the implementation has been going very well. OK, well, hopefully things take a turn down the road. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for having me.