Um, What’s a Practice Act?

Last week was a short week with the Thanksgiving holiday, but I wanted to talk about an interesting meeting we attended. It was the Pharmacy Practice Act Working Group comprised of pharmacists in various aspects of pharmacy (legislative, academic, clinical, rural, etc) who all get together to work on drafting a new pharmacy practice act. 

I have to admit I went into the meeting not even knowing what a practice act was, let alone that the profession has one (in each state), and that Minnesota is looking to make some major revisions. For those like me who have no clue what I’m talking about, the practice act was drafted about 80 years ago to spell out what a pharmacist is and what activities they do.  Someone at the meeting summed it up best when they said, “You know what you can do and what you can’t do.  You just have to figure out what’s possible in between.” 

I feel like pharmacy is really at a crossroads right now with healthcare reform. It’s possible that pharmacy will achieve solid integration into the healthcare team alongside nurses and doctors where they understand how we can complement what they do, without infringing on their territory. The other option is missing the bus on this opportunity that may never happen again.

So much has changed in the last 80 years that needs to be reflected in this new revision.  At that time, pharmacists never dealt with insurance issues, HIPAA, immunizations, or even have much of a grasp on disease states. Much of their job back then was as a listening post for town gossip with a little compounding and counting pills into a bottle. Unfortunately, that could be the future of pharmacy if we can’t figure out where we want to place the profession in the big picture.  If we plan to rely on an old document dictating what we can do, it will be fairly easy to let our jobs become extinct. However, it’s going to take more than just Minnesota reworking their practice act to reflect changes we have made to the profession. ALL states are going to need to take a look at their Practice Act to make sure we leave room for growth in the future so we don’t lock ourselves out of potential opportunity. 

 So if anyone else is interested in what the practice act is, you can access some of it (since I got the impression it was pretty long) at https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=152 and https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=151.