The past year brought challenges and celebrations. Through it all, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians rose to the occasion. Thank you practitioners, for consistently providing excellent care to Albertans.

We celebrated our best with the APEX Awards

2012-13 APEX Award recipients

Practitioners step up for their profession, run for ACP council

Who is on council?

Alberta pharmacy practitioners enhancing their practices to provide better patient care

• Pharmacists with additional prescribing authorization: 394 (up from 220 in February)
• Pharmacists with injection authorization: 2764 (up from 2044 in February)
• Many pharmacists completed the U of A’s Practice Skills: Monitoring drug therapy using laboratory Values course
• More pharmacists applied for Prac IDs

Pharmacy technicians becoming regulated, improving work flows and patient care

266 now regulated (up from 115 last December)

Practitioners building the professions’ futures

Practitioners volunteer as PEBC assessors

Preceptors enhance Faculty programs

First Alberta Pharmacists’ Centennial Leadership Award recipient named

ACP partnering to improve practice

ACP and CPSA partner to identify high risk patients

New tools ease practice puzzles

Medication-Assisted Treatment for OpioidDependence

Chat, Check, and Chart Pain Management (Opioid) tool

Chat, Check, and Chart tool – assessing opioid prescriptions

The Systems Approach to Quality Assurance

New Structured Practical Training program piloted – rolling out in 2014

ACP introduces new tools for connecting with registrants, stakeholders and the public

First webcast AGM

Public awareness campaign

Social media introduced

If you haven’t already, please like, share, and chat on our pages and get the social media ball rolling! Visit us at:

• Facebook – www.facebook.com/ACPharmacists
• Twitter – Twitter.com (search for @ACPharmacists)

(P.S. Our Facebook page is an organizational page. That means when you “Like” us, you get to see our posts in your newsfeed, but we don’t get any access to your personal Facebook account.)

Changes in practice environments

• FCCs coming
• Physician assistants introduced
• PharmD program beginning

Roll out of updated competence program

See Mar/Apr 2013 acpnews, page 5, for philosophy and principles

New policy for reauthorizing pharmacists to administer drugs by injection

See Jan/Feb 2013 acpnews, page 11, for details

New requirements for pharmacy practice management systems (PPMS)

The 35 requirements, which come into effect in 2016, address technical, functional and administrative requirements of PPMS.

These requirements will be instructive to pharmacists, pharmacy managers and owners, vendors, and the developers of electronic health record infrastructures on the functionality required by pharmacy practice management systems in order for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to comply with their standards of practice.

Next steps in proposed prohibition of inducements

The comment and review period will close on Jan. 31. After reviewing the feedback received during this review, ACP’s council may adopt the proposed amendments, make changes to the proposed amendments, or not adopt the proposed amendments.

No fee increases

In light of the changing pharmacy economy over the past year, council agreed to not increase any registrant fees in 2014.