During the last three ASHP Midyear meetings, I’ve had the great opportunity to visit with many of my colleagues about the important issue of accreditation for pharmacy practice in my role as executive director of the Center for Pharmacy Practice Accreditation (CPPA). I bet you’re thinking that these must have been some short conversations! But to me, accreditation is one of the most exciting innovations in pharmacy today. That’s because accreditation is not an “add-on” to everything we do every day. Rather, it’s all about how we deliver care to our patients.
Now, I admit accreditation is labor- and time - intensive. But becoming accredited validates that your practice is providing care according to profession-wide quality, safety, and efficiency standards. In other words, accreditation ensures that your practices follow standards that are specific, measurable, and predictable. Accreditation shows that your practice is continually improving through your investment in innovative patient care services.
Most of you are very familiar and experienced with accreditation for your hospitals and health-systems as well as accreditation for residency programs. Until now, we’ve not had an accreditation for how we deliver care to our patients in our pharmacy practices. We’ve not had accreditation standards written by pharmacists— the medication experts—for pharmacy-delivered care. But now we do, through the CPPA.
CPPA started as a memorandum of understanding between the American Pharmacists Association and the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy to create practice standards for community pharmacy. This was an important decision because community pharmacy was a practice area that had no previous requirements beyond licensure. When the leadership of ASHP became interested in the concept, the vision of CPPA expanded to the development and implementation of practice standards across the medication-use continuum. The CPPA was designed to be the one accreditor for pharmacy practices from within the profession. Our mission is to serve the public health by raising the level of pharmacy-delivered patient care services through accreditation of pharmacy practices.
CPPA opened its Community Pharmacy Practice accreditation program in the spring of 2014, and we have three accredited practices to date, including the Johns Hopkins Outpatient Pharmacy in Baltimore, MD. The standards in this program are applicable to all outpatient pharmacy practices, including outpatient hospital, clinic-based, independents, and chains. . And we’re not stopping with community pharmacy. I’m excited to announce that last week, CPPA opened its accreditation program for specialty pharmacy practices http://pharmacypracticeaccredit.org/.
As you can see, I’m passionate about accreditation. Pharmacy practice needs relevant, valid, external evidence of the high quality of care we provide. I believe accreditation is that tool.
Want to know more? Check out our website at http://pharmacypracticeaccredit.org/. Have a question, comment, or feedback about the importance of accreditation in pharmacy practice? I’m happy to continue the conversation below!