About the standard
The Dispensing of Schedule 1 or 2 Drugs by a Physician for a Fee standard (proposed new title: Dispensing Drugs for a Fee) was published in 2010 and requires review to ensure it aligns with current best practices and related legislation. Additions and amendments around this standard are intended to support patient safety by emphasizing the provision of appropriate information to inform patient decisions, supporting prescribing within the physician-patient relationship whenever possible and providing clarity around requirements for obtaining, storing and dispensing drugs. The inclusion of an appendix supports regulated members in meeting the same dispensing requirements as pharmacists.
What’s changed?
- Inclusion of additional clauses and clarifying language to ensure prescribing occurs within a physician-patient relationship whenever possible and to emphasize the right of the patient to make informed decisions with correct and appropriate information about the drugs being dispensed;
- Clause added to ensure regulated members appropriately follow relevant legislation when prescribing; and
- Clauses added and language altered around requirements for obtaining, storing and dispensing drugs to better protect the best interests of the patient.
View the draft standard
All ResourcesYour opinion matters
Changes to CPSA’s Standards of Practice impact a physician and physician assistant’s day-to-day practice and the standard of care patients can expect. Your feedback is important to us, as it helps us develop clear, reasonable expectations and helpful, applicable resources. We appreciate the time you take and the input you provide.
CPSA regulated members, partner organizations, other healthcare professionals and Albertans are invited to provide feedback from November 20 to December 20, 2024. Feedback may be provided via survey, email or the comment form on each page.
Anonymized feedback will be considered by Council at their spring meeting. Once amendments are finalized and approved by Council, members will be notified by email and The Messenger newsletter.
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Other feedback on this standard
Does the drug dispensing standard apply to free drug samples provided by pharmaceutical companies? Or just drugs a physician is dispensing and selling to a patient?
CPSA Reply:
Hi, Dr. Davis.
This is addressed in the second paragraph of the preamble:
“For the purpose of this standard, regulated members who provide medication samples to their patients at no cost are not considered to be “dispensing” medication.”
Is that sufficiently clear? If not, we would appreciate any suggestions you have for improving the clarity of this topic.
Chantelle
Standards of Practice Advisor
Not being able to charge any profits for dispensing a drug is unfair and unreasonable, as the Physician needs to be able to account for ALL capital expenditures in the dispensation of any drugs. As such, the direct capital costs should be reflected in all charged fees AS WELL AS the indirect capital costs for time, storage, administration, support and dispensation of the drugs. The CPSA, in requiring Physicians to register no profit, is essentially requiring Physicians to bear the costs of health care on their own backs. The service of dispensing drugs is a societal benefit that should be maintained by society. Where there is no fee schedule associated with dispensing a drug - it is by definition an uninsured service. As such, all aspects of the service should be compensated for by the patient - including direct and indirect capital costs most often born through the profit model. This includes the Physician's time to administer to the standards of practice. The CPSA needs to be much more respectful of Physicians' time and resources, as it is often perceived that scope creep at the CPSA has been increasingly putting the societal costs of Health Care on Physicians' backs. This has been and continues to be a direct contributor towards Physicians abandoning the province in favour of jurisdictions that are a lot less "communist" in culture. The CPSA is causing direct long term harm to society by not respecting the fact that Physicians have both the right and the obligation to be compensated for their time and expertise, and that such compensation has been dwindling drastically over time - to the detriment of patients. The CPSA's overly harsh requirement for "no profits" could be seen as a direct cause of this societal harm by obstructing any reasonable profits to Physicians. Society would ultimately benefit from the CPSA becoming much more aware of and educated to the potential of societal harm through its culture of obstruction of reasonable profits by Physicians - especially for uninsured services. This Standard or practice therefore needs to be rewritten in a more informed and balanced manner to allow for a reasonable amount of profit for the Physicians to be compensated fairly for the dispensation of medications to patients, in the context of the very reasonable requirements of the standard of practice.