SK undergoing provincial compounding assessments

REGINA – Both Saskatchewan Cancer and Saskatchewan Health Authority have engaged North West Telepharmacy Solutions (NTS) compounding consultants to conduct comprehensive assessments of all their sterile compounding facilities including renovation plans to comply with the National Association of Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities (NAPRA) Standard requirements.

In March 2023, NTS finished the consultation process for Saskatchewan Cancer while starting the Saskatchewan Health Authority consultation in August 2023. The consultation for Saskatchewan Health Authority will involve travel to over 15 hospital sites across the province and assessing the current compounding environment and workflow and creating detailed renovation plans, including costs, for improvements to the workspace. To minimize patient impact, NTS consultants will also be developing both contingency operational and sequencing plans for the provincial wide renovations.

The consulting services offered by NTS is part of the larger Telepharmacy Services contract available through HealthPRO Canada, a leader in procurement, facilitating and managing modern, innovative and sustainable contracts for supplies, equipment and medications.

“We have been supporting hospitals over the last 10 years in the sterile compounding space,” says Kevin McDonald (pictured), director at NTS. “There have been numerous examples where pharmacist experts were not engaged early in the process of assessment/design leading to costly renovations later.”

NTS has also partnered up with Visante who have extensive experience in the US with large health centers working on complying with the new USP sterile compounding standards – standards which many new sterile compounding facilities should be referring to. Together, the consulting team comprised of NTS and Visante sterile compounding experts, have been able to elevate the standard of sterile compounding facility assessments.

“Our partnership with Visante has been instrumental in ensuring Canadian hospitals have comprehensive access to sterile compounding expertise,” says Sammu Dhaliwall, senior manager of Business Development at NTS. “Large Canadian hospitals should be paying close attention to the upcoming US sterile compounding standards to be released when planning any updates and renovations to their workflow and compounding space.”

The US sterile compounding standards will be officially revised, released and enforceable on November 1, 2023. The Canadian NAPRA standards were released in 2016 with many standards based on the old US standards from over a decade ago with no revisions since. It is only logical for hospitals to plan to meet the most stringent and recent best practices, which are soon to be in the new USP Standards.

NTS has been providing sterile compounding consulting services since 2016 and has worked with over two dozen hospitals across Canada from gap analysis to overseeing design and renovation phases.

NTS Telepharmacy Solutions is Canada’s leading telepharmacy provider of remote hospital pharmacist services, working with over 90 hospitals across Canada. They include hospitals utilizing EPIC, Cerner and Meditech Expanse. In 2022, NTS pharmacists entered or verified over 1.8 million medication orders and were involved in over 230,000 interventions, many of which have prevented adverse events to patients.

In addition to sterile compounding consultation, NTS also provides third-party sterile and non-sterile certification, accredited learning modules for sterile and non-sterile certification, and assisting with implementation of workflow solutions.