In Community Pharmacy, the Scope of Practice Is Expanding Quickly

Who would have imagined, not so long ago, that access to this many primary care services would run through your community pharmacy? These days, among other things, you assess, prescribe, vaccinate, and test. Since 2023, with the expansion of regulatory frameworks, the funding of new services, and the rise of primary care clinics in pharmacies, the direction is clear: across the country, pharmacists are being trusted with more and more clinical acts.

Province by province, your role isn’t just growing; it’s growing faster than ever. And the next wave is already here: new minor-ailment services, expanded vaccination, point-of-care testing, and revisions to practise standards.

In this post, I’m writing from a community pharmacist’s perspective to offer a concise overview of what’s changed, and more importantly, a practical look at what to watch in the coming months.

Navigating Change

Across the evolution of clinical pharmacy practice, two themes stand out: first, the pace remains brisk, with several provinces already announcing new services and legislative or regulatory changes. Second, it’s time to adapt, because integrating these new services into your offering will require adjusting your management methods and adopting new tools to support you.

The Pace Remains Brisk: A Canadian Snapshot

From coast to coast, the pattern is the same: regulatory expansions, funded services, point-of-care testing, and vaccination are all gaining momentum. Here’s where things stand, province by province, and, more importantly, what’s coming next.

Time to Adapt

Integrating new clinical services quickly into your practice can be demanding: you don’t always know where to start or how best to support your teams.

And while the added workload is real, the upside is undeniable: better outcomes for your patients, greater professional recognition, and a stronger health system with improved interprofessional collaboration.

I recommend a stepwise approach that respects the comfort level and strengths of each pharmacist and every team member.

• Respect team capacity, and involve pharmacy technicians and technical assistants in triage, appointment scheduling, and data collection.
• Clarify your service offer to your patient community, and plan to evolve it gradually.
• Establish a structured scan of authoritative sources in your province. Assign an owner and give them protected time for this work (AI can help here, too).
• For ongoing training and horizon scanning, leverage resources from professional orders, associations, and chains/banners.
• Equip yourselves with clinical decision-support and documentation tools to ensure standards of practice are met for all new activities. From decision algorithms to documentation templates, these tools are now almost essential for successful implementation.

Tools for “Real Life”

Rxconsultaction: For Clinical Service Management*

Seamlessly integrated with your pharmacy management software, RxConsultAction guides you step by step in performing and documenting clinical acts. Already used by nearly 2,700 pharmacies across Canada, it provides valuable decision support while helping you remain compliant with regulatory requirements.

In short:

• Available in all provinces
• Interactive decision-support forms
• Structured consultation documentation that meets regulatory requirements and standards of practice
• Integrations with multiple pharmacy systems: less double entry, direct claims, and automatic charting to the patient record
• Regular updates to ensure compliance with legal, regulatory, and billing requirements, plus up-to-date clinical forms

Let’s talk results: Every month, over 280,000 clinical services are carried out through RxConsultAction in Canada.

Chroma: For Chronic Disease Management*

This add-on to RxConsultAction centralizes clinical follow-up, structures documentation, and streamlines billing for remunerated services, directly in your pharmacy software. Coming in 2026.

Key features:

• Individualized, evolving care plan: editable, improvable, and always stored in the pharmacy system
• Comprehensive data capture synchronized with the patient record
• Documentation of interventions (immediate or planned)
• Billing for associated remunerated services (medication review, care plan, pharmacist opinion, etc.)
• Native integration with RxConsultAction for optimal use within the pharmacy workflow

Intervention Opportunities: For Targeting the Right Clinical Services*

As soon as you launch interaction checking in RxVigilance, the Intervention Opportunities add-on activates, reviewing the patient record to present a contextualized view of all clinical acts you can provide in the pharmacy. Coming in 2026.

Key features:

• Tailored intervention suggestions based on the profile: vaccination, chronic disease follow-up, therapy optimization, deprescribing
• Workflow integration: automatically generated and accessible directly from the Perspectives viewer
• Remuneration indicators that show, at a glance, eligible clinical services and provincial program coverage

Ride the Wave: Anticipate, Align, Act

Looking at how clinical services in pharmacy have evolved across Canada, one thing is clear: the profession has seen real, rapid growth in recent years. We’ve moved from barely imagining pharmacists’ roles beyond dispensing to a broad, cross-provincial openness to entrust them with more clinical acts.

I genuinely believe the teams that will navigate change best are those that keep an eye on what’s coming, align their practices with authoritative documents, and lean on tools integrated into their workflow—while respecting their internal capacity throughout the transition.

You don’t need to wait for the “perfect moment” to catch the next wave, deliver impact for your patients, and keep operations running smoothly. By anticipating changes and adapting your ways of working now, you can make steady, incremental progress—starting today.

........................................

*All our tools are based on exclusively Canadian data, updated monthly.

👉 To learn more, download our supplementary document by filling the following form.