Response Needed

   As more and more people in America are able to get healthcare insurance through the Affordable Care Act of 2010, primary care and chronic care visits are expected to dramatically increase while at the same time there appears to be a shortage of providers on the horizon (Woolf, Locke, and Potts, 2016). Many hospitals and organizations are seeing this trend and working to put plans into place to prepare for this by assessing staffing needs and ways of utilizing that staff to their full potential. One trend which has begun to take hold, is the utilization of pharmacist as a referral service after a provider has diagnosed the problem and developed a clinical care plan to be started, thereby allowing the pharmacist to manage the patient’s treatment within his or her scope of practice as defined by state laws and further detailed by the organizations internal protocols (Woolf, Locke, and Potts, 2016).

       In 1979, Washington State was the first state to permit pharmacist to prescribe under the collaborative drug therapy agreement (CDTA) and the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle in now utilizing this, under the Washington State law, which allows pharmacists to prescribe, complete physical exams, and order labs or other diagnostic exams (Woolf, Locke, and Potts, 2016). North Carolina law also allows for pharmacists to provide extended services through the clinical pharmacist practitioner (CPP) designation, which is currently being utilized by the University of North Carolina Medical Center, which currently employs around 30 CPPs throughout various clinical settings (Hawes, Misita, Burkhart, McKnight, Deyo, Lee, and ... Eckel, 2016). The most progressive of all is Alberta, Canada which in 2007, established legislation that allowed pharmacists to independently prescribe and manage patients on-going drug therapy, except for opiates and controlled substances (Gray, and Mysak, 2016).

References:

Gray, M., and Mysak, T. (2016). The road to pharmacist prescribing in Alberta Health Services.

            American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 73(18), 1451-1455.

Hawes, E. M., Misita, C., Burkhart, J. I., McKnight, L., Deyo, Z. M., Lee, R., and ... Eckel, S. F.

            (2016). Prescribing pharmacists in the ambulatory care setting: Experience at the

            University of North Carolina Medical Center. American Journal of Health-System

            Pharmacy, 73(18), 1425-1433.

Woolf, R., Locke, A., and Potts, C. (2016). Pharmacist prescribing within an integrated health

            system in Washington. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 73(18), 1416-

            1424.

Must Have Substantive Info on This Students DB.

All References & Citing Where/When Necessary.