Comparison of Canadian Pharmacy Education and Practice Standards with Accreditation Standards of the Canadian Pharmacy Residency Board.

In the past decade, Canadian pharmacy education and training programs have adopted competency-based frameworks for practice and education. However, there remains a lack of standardization and harmony across the multiple sets of standards that guide pharmacy practice and education. In addition to various provincial standards, there are currently 3 national standards of practice governing the development of a pharmacist practitioner through the continuum of learning and career development: the 2010 standards of the Canadian Pharmacy Residency Board (CPRB),1 the 2010 educational outcomes of the Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada (AFPC),2 and the 2014 professional competencies for Canadian pharmacists at entry to practice outlined by the National Association of Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities (NAPRA).3 The AFPC educational outcomes define expected performance for students upon completion of their first professional degree program in pharmacy. The NAPRA competencies outline the requirements of pharmacists at the point of licensure, whereas the CPRB standards outline the expectations upon completion of a pharmacy practice residency. Currently, these 3 sets of standards function independently, thereby creating the potential for confusion, duplication, and scattering of efforts. Instead, a thoughtfully developed, unified set of standards spanning the continuum of practice, from undergraduate learning through to continuing professional education, might better facilitate professional cohesion and long-term career development.4,5 Accompanying a unified overarching standard of practice, a clear articulation of performance levels and ranges of practice contexts is required for each stage of practitioner development.6-8 Such a document would help to translate the unified overarching standard of practice into a practical model for education and assessment.9 Standards alignment has been called for in other disciplines, such as medicine, audiology, speech-language pathology, physiotherapy, and nursing.10-17 The medical profession in Canada has produced not only a unified set of competencybased standards (known as CanMEDS) for all of its 67 medical subspecialties, but also milestones intended to support the continuum of learning and practice from the undergraduate level to retirement. The milestones, which articulate performance levels and ranges of practice contexts, serve to translate CanMEDS into a practical model of education and assessment.4,8,13 Because no such overarching, aligned standard of practice exists in pharmacy, the first step in alignment involves a foundational comparison of similarities and differences among the existing standards.18 The purpose of the analysis described here was to compare the 3 sets of national standards for pharmacy education and practice.