The Future of Pharmacy is Experience

Mary-Anne Akpanya

After working as a pharmacist in a hospital dispensary in Ghana for four years, Mary-Anne Akpanya, ’22 CCPP, wanted to do more. She explored her potential in public health as a program pharmacist for Ghana's National Tuberculosis Control program and completed both a master’s and a PhD. 

But it wasn’t until she made a couple of short trips to Canada — almost 20 years after graduating from pharmacy school at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology — that she found her calling.

“I was so surprised at the scope of practice of pharmacists in Canada,” says Akpanya. “They worked so closely with patients, and I yearned to be part of it.”

So, in 2020, she packed her bags and arrived in Calgary. This time, to stay.

To practise in Canada, internationally educated pharmacists are required to pass a two-part qualifying exam through the Pharmacy Examining Board of Canada, which is called the PEBC Certification Process for International Pharmacy Graduates. To practise in Alberta, they need also to pass the ethics and jurisprudence exam through the Alberta College of Pharmacy. And they must register with the Alberta College of Pharmacy and then complete 1,000 hours of training in Alberta pharmacies.

Add the pressures of meeting English language requirements, adjusting to a new life, culture and climate, and the fact that Alberta pharmacists have the largest scope of practice in the world — and this licensing process can seem daunting.

So, when Akpanya was notified of an additional requirement to the licensure process — the University of Alberta’s Certificate to Canadian Pharmacy Practice (CCPP) — she felt discouraged. 

“Initially, I saw it as another hurdle to overcome,” says Akpanya. “But once I started the program, I began to understand it and appreciate its value. “The things that I admired — that motivated me to want to practise pharmacy — were the things that Alberta pharmacists do. And I didn’t have their patient-care skills yet. The CCPP program gave that to me.”

The 10-month program, introduced in April 2021, is designed to further develop the knowledge and skills that internationally educated pharmacist graduates already have. It aims to prepare them to be competent and confident practitioners within Alberta’s health-care system.

“We want to support their transition to the Canadian health-care context, culture and practice,” says Sherif Mahmoud, ’10 PhD, clinical associate professor and director of the CCPP program. “To help new pharmacists integrate really well, Day 1 — and to change them from excellent pharmacists into super-pharmacists.”

With the largest scope of pharmacy practice in the world, Alberta’s health-care landscape  and pharmacists’ place in it is quite different. For both internationally educated pharmacists and pharmacists from other Canadian provinces, some of the duties of Alberta pharmacists, such as the ability to prescribe Schedule 1 drugs, adapt prescriptions, order and interpret lab tests, and administer injections, are totally new.

For others, like Akpanya, the patient-centred care model is the main learning curve. That is, it involves personally assessing patients, coming up with appropriate recommendations, creating long-term care plans and regularly working in collaboration with other health-care practitioners. Even handling health and medication insurance can be new to someone who practises outside of Canada.

There are a lot of moving parts. All of these areas, and more, are addressed by the CCPP program. 

“Part of the program aims to help students understand how Canada’s health-care system functions, to know the roles of pharmacists within this context, to understand how to manage the interprofessional relationships and collaboration that happens within the system and generally guide cultural competency,” says Mahmoud. 

“Then, in the skills lab, learners have the opportunity to practise and demonstrate patient-care skills in simulated interactions.”

For Akpanya, her undergraduate pharmacy education had focused on sciences, such as pharmaceutics and chemistry. Clinical and patient-care skills were not taught as they were outside the scope of what pharmacists did in Ghana at the time.

But she had practised as a pharmacy professional for almost 20 years, completed a master’s and PhD in public health and had a wealth of knowledge and experience that couldn’t be ignored.

“It is important to us that we acknowledge the learners as pharmacists,” says Mahmoud. “I myself am an internationally educated pharmacist, so I know it’s important to understand and value all of the things they already know, in addition to what they need to learn.”

“The environment didn’t feel like traditional schooling,” says Akpanya. “It was more like professional learning empowerment. It was conducive for us to have discussions and share our thoughts easily with our lecturers and colleagues. We were treated like the professionals that we are, and felt like we could openly share what we know, and what we didn’t know, without judgment.”

An important part of that professional empowerment was connecting learners with other Alberta pharmacists. In CCPP’s Community of Practice sessions, pharmacists from a variety of practice settings led collaborative sessions to talk to the learners about their areas of work. These settings include: community, hospital, rural, compounding, Indigenous communities, policy and governance.

“The networking prepared me for the job market and my career ahead,” says Akpanya. “We learned about leadership, how to develop and navigate our careers and all the paths that were open to us.”

In July 2022, Akpanya graduated from the CCPP program and received recognition for excellence as the top learner in her cohort. She is currently completing her 1,000 hours of internship at Shoppers Drug Mart, and she intends to finish her exams with the Pharmacy Examining Board of Canada and register with the Alberta College of Pharmacy to become a practising pharmacist in Alberta before the end of this year.

“The CCPP program was exactly what I needed to meet the expectations of practising here and to write my exams,” says Akpanya. “It’s going so well! So far, I’ve had no challenges integrating into the Canadian system. And I feel super excited that I am ready for this.”

This story is from the Winter edition of The Mortar & Pestle Magazine.