Quality improvement: A strategy to accelerate pharmacist integration into team-based primary care practice

摘要

The role of pharmacists in primary care teams has been a subject of increasing interest in recent years as Canadian primary care practice has shifted toward an interprofessional team-based model.1 In the 2013 “Guidelines for pharmacists integrating into primary care teams,” Jorgenson et al.1 summarized common barriers to pharmacist integration into these teams: lack of role clarity, physician resistance, patients’ uncertainty about the pharmacist’s role and lack of pharmacist assertiveness. In this practice brief, we discuss how a pharmacy team–led quality improvement (QI) project in an academic family health team addressed some of the aforementioned barriers, augmented the pharmacy team’s caseload and facilitated integration into the family practice care team for a pharmacy resident new to this setting.