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Passed a resolution Sunday asking its state association to oppose legislation that would hinder interaction
NILES
Area pharmacists lament the diminishing personal contact between them and their patients caused by the high volume of prescriptions they are required to fill.
“Pharmacists are the gatekeepers to correct medications,” said pharmacist John Petracci of Boardman, who sold the independent Bel-Park Pharmacy he owned for many years in 2013 and now works for Parkway Pharmacy in Beachwood.
Petracci referred to a program authorized in several states, called tech-check-tech, in which relatively untrained technicians make the last check of a prescription before it goes to a client, a “public health nightmare.”
“Pharmacists have five to eight years of training and should be the last persons to check the accuracy of a prescription. It’s a travesty. It further removes pharmacists from the people we want to care for, a responsibility we take very seriously,” Petracci said.
Pharmacists checking prescriptions is also a federal and state requirement, Raymond R. Carlson, outgoing president of the Eastern Ohio Pharmacists Association, said before the organization’s 2017 annual meeting Sunday at McMenamy’s Banquet Hall.
Pharmacists have an equal and corresponding responsibility with physicians to ensure that a prescription is written for a legitimate medical purpose, Carlson said.
Specific Ohio Board of Pharmacy rules require that before every prescription is filled, the pharmacist shall perform certain specific duties to thwart abuse and misuse of prescription drugs, Carlson said.
To combat some of the practices pharmacists say are making it more difficult for them to do their jobs properly, particularly the tech-check-tech model he said is being pushed by the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, the EOPA members at Sunday’s meeting approved a resolution urging the officers of EOPA and the Ohio Pharmacists Association to “ask academia and professional associations to re-evaluate the responsibilities of pharmacists in dispensing medications according to the Ohio Administrative Code; and asked that agencies examine current drug-dispensing practices and assess the potential impact on drug distribution prior to enacting any new law or rule that would further separate pharmacists from their lawful duties and responsibilities.”
“It may be the first of its kind of action in the state,” Carlson said.
The National Association of Chain Drug Stores says it wants to move to a tech-check-tech system to free up time for pharmacists to interact with patients. The fear is that the stores will end up cutting pharmacists’ hours, said Rich Ferenchak, newly elected EOPA president and a pharmacist at the Giant Eagle pharmacy in Boardman.
“We’re turning from a patient-pharmacist interaction to an assembly-line mentality,” Ferenchak said. “The reason we exist is to make sure the patient gets the right medicine and that they understand the side effects of drug-to-drug interactions and drug-to-disease interaction.”