How your pharmacist can help you manage your prescription renewals

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TORONTO -- It’s happened to all of us. You wake up one morning, trudge to your medicine cabinet and lay out the medications you’re supposed to take each day when you realize you have run out of a drug you take everyday — and it’s Saturday! How will you get a renewal?

Enter: your local pharmacist.

If you regularly take medication for chronic conditions like high cholesterol or hypertension, you could be eligible to receive a prescription renewal from your pharmacist, keeping you safe and healthy until you can reconnect with your doctor during business hours.

“Historically, we’d have to run around and try to get a script from a physician, but now we have the ability to (renew) prescriptions for chronic medications,” said John Papastergiou, a Shoppers Drug Mart pharmacist in Toronto. “The pandemic has definitely highlighted how useful this new scope is, since it’s difficult to see your physician in real life.”

Chronic medications are defined as medications you have been taking for a “long period of time,” said Papastergiou.

This new scope allows for more flexibility in a person’s health-care journey, and according to Zubin Austin, academic director at the Centre for Practice Excellence at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, it can actually take unnecessary strain off of overworked parts of the healthcare system.

“Use the example of oral contraceptive,” Austin said. “If you are a young, healthy, non-smoking woman, you may not need to go see your physician every six months to get that renewal — perhaps that’s even a waste of health-care resources. Allowing a pharmacist to authorize the renewal is more efficient for the patient and cost-saving for the health-care system.”

This would not include medication used for acute conditions, such as antibiotics for individual infections.

“Generally we wouldn’t offer a refill for an antibiotic for an ear infection, for example, because that’s something that would need to be reassessed by a doctor,” Papastergiou said. “This is when we would send you to either urgent care, like a walk-in clinic, or back to your family doctor, because the condition requires more assessing.”

Austin agrees — pharmacists will approach each new situation as unique from the last.

“It’s a balancing act, but I would say the vast majority of pharmacists understand that and will do what’s best for the patient,” Austin said.

When you call or go see your pharmacist for a prescription renewal, you can expect your condition and history will be assessed before a renewal is granted. “We’ll ask things like: has your condition improved? Is it getting worse? Has anything changed? Have you started any new medications? These are all important questions,” Papastergiou said.

At that point, if it’s deemed safe and appropriate for you to continue on that medication, your pharmacist will issue a renewal.

It’s for the purposes of prescription renewals that Papastergiou recommends finding a pharmacist you like and sticking with them, as opposed to bouncing from one pharmacy to another.

“If we don’t have a clear history (of your medication), it’s possible you won’t get that prescription renewed — especially not for the quantity that you’re used to,” he said.