Abstract
It is a Pleasure to Present in this Issue Most of the Posters and abstracts from CPhA's annual conference. (Note that we are reserving some featured abstracts for an upcoming issue.)
This section sets out in miniature the question that we will be developing in CPJ over the next few years: how can we make pharmacy research appealing, interesting, and relevant to the busy pharmacist? So far, the feedback on our redesign has been positive, as we strive to make abstracts and research articles more accessible and relevant to you.
The more important question is the “why.” After all, it is old news to you that optimal pharmacy operations in general, and your cognitive services in particular, support better patient outcomes and better population health in a way that is extraordinarily cost-effective to our health system overall.
It is a paradox, then, that pharmacists' very efficiency is part of the “research problem” that pharmacy practice researchers must address. Pharmacists deliver so much primary care and public health efficiently and effectively now, that it is a part of the health landscape that is all too easy to take for granted. Only by teasing out these threads of pharmacy practice in the framework of research — i.e., quantifiable data about return on investment — can cognitive fees become a reality in the broad scheme of pharmacy. To the extent that there is a dollar sign at the bottom line, that is one reason why pharmacy practice research matters to each and every pharmacist in Canada.
Then too, the research can and will point the way to some important new horizons for practice, be it in delivering immunizations, disease management, health promotion, or pharmacist prescribing, to name just a few.
As the capacity for pharmacy practice research is just emerging from its infancy, like other new practice research fields that have expanded exponentially in the past 20 years (family medicine and nursing, for example), it will take a while to find its legs. The pharmacists — practitioners and academics both — who are breaking new ground are truly working on behalf of each and every pharmacist in Canada.
The coming years will show that there is opportunity for each of you to participate in a practice-research project — and that is exciting too.
Footnotes
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CPJ is distributed to all community pharmacists across Canada in fulfillment of CPhA's mandate to provide leadership to the profession. It is not limited to CPhA members.
Opinions are those of the writer, not necessarily of the Canadian Pharmacists Association