Each year when pharmacists renew their practice permits, there is a section on the renewal application form to provide demographic information, including your employment status, your place of employment, and more. While you are familiar with keeping your personal myACP records up to date in your profile, this data is collected separately once per year to report information to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), and to enable ACP a better understanding of its registrants and workforce demographic.
CIHI is an independent, not-for-profit organization that provides information that is used to accelerate improvements in health care, health system performance, and population health across Canada.
What’s changing?
This year, the process for collecting demographic information has been updated. Before you renew your practice permit, you will need to go to your profile in myACP, complete the CIHI statistics survey, and then proceed with your practice permit renewal. For step-by-step instructions to help you through this process, refer to the Completing the CIHI survey help guide.
You may notice that there are a few more questions about demographic information this year. These additional pieces of information—related to languages spoken, educational background, race-based identity and more—are used by CIHI to provide a better understanding of the composition of the health workforce in Canada. For these demographic questions, there is an option to select “Prefer not to answer.”
The CIHI survey process involves providing the information requested in the form. In subsequent years, this form will have all of your information prepopulated based on the information you provide this year, so all you will have to do is review the information and provide any updates as needed.
How is the data being used?
CIHI uses this demographic data, collected from healthcare workers across the country, to build their Health Workforce Database, which contains information on supply, geographic, demographic, education, and employment characteristics for healthcare providers across Canada.
This data is needed to support federal, provincial, and territorial workforce planning and policy development and research. This demographic information can also be used to measure, monitor, and address inequities and to increase workplace diversity, ultimately improving health care for patients and providers.
All of the data submitted to CIHI is deidentified, meaning your personal information is not tied to the data. CIHI also has a comprehensive privacy program in place to protect the confidentiality and security of their data holdings with policies that govern how CIHI collects, stores, analyzes, and disseminates data, in accordance with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act(PIPEDA).
From ACP’s perspective, the collected data may be used for internal policy analysis to support person-centred care, but personal information about an identifiable registrant will never be disclosed externally, unless ACP has obtained your consent or has a legal obligation to do so.
New requirement: what you need to do
Pharmacist practice permit renewal opens on April 1, 2025. Before you submit your application to renew your practice permit, you must complete the CIHI survey in your myACP profile along with completing all other requirements. You can follow step-by-step instructions to help you through this process in the Completing the CIHI survey help guide.
