Ontario Pharmacists' Crisis over Bill 16: A Missed Opportunity?

Abstract

Introduction: In 2010, the Ontario government brought forward Bill 16, which, among other things, removed pharmacists' professional allowances. While many would disagree with this unilateral action by the Ontario government, it also could have served as a crisis for change towards patient-centred care. We sought to examine the response of the pharmacy profession in Ontario to this crisis as it relates to the vision outlined in the Blueprint for Pharmacy. Methods: We systematically examined publicly available responses to Schedule 5 of Ontario's Bill 16 during the period from April to June 16, 2010. A rapid textual analysis of the data using tag or word clouds and a qualitative content analysis were performed on all of the data collected. Results: The rapid textual analysis revealed that the most frequently used terms were “pharmacist,” “pharmacy” and “professional allowances”; the least used were “layoffs,” “service cuts” and “patient care.” Content analysis revealed 4 themes: the desire to maintain the status quo of practice, a focus on the business of pharmacy, pharmacy stakeholders' perceptions of government's attitude towards the profession and changes to patient services. Discussion: It is notable that patient care was almost completely absent from the discussion, a reflection that our profession has not embraced patient-centred care. This also represents a missed opportunity — a crisis that could have been used to move the profession towards the Blueprint's vision. We thought that the Blueprint had already achieved this consensus, but the Ontario experience has shown that this may not be the case.