Countries encouraged to assess readiness for vaccinations by pharmacists with new tool

During World Immunization Week recently, the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) offered a new resource to help countries self-assess readiness of their regulations to enable pharmacist-delivered vaccination services and, where needed, to implement such regulations.
Developed by FIP’s Regulators Advisory Group, it covers broad pharmacist-led roles related to vaccination, from supply chain management to administration and prescribing. “This new resource from FIP is based on the experiences of professional regulators in countries where pharmacy-led vaccination has been successfully introduced and regulated. With it, we aim to support regulators, policy-makers and national organisations in developing strategies or enabling regulatory frameworks in countries where the pharmacy workforce has a limited role in vaccination strategies so that it can contribute further to the global imperative of improving immunisation coverage,” said Mr Brett Simmonds, group chair.

The ‘Pharmacy-led vaccination services: Regulatory self-assessment and implementation tool’ aims to help identify strengths and areas for improvement in order to inform vaccination policy and planning efforts.

Any advocacy strategy to achieve an expanded role for the pharmacy workforce in vaccination services at country level needs to be grounded in an in-depth understanding of the needs at country level, an awareness of the requirements, resources (workforce, infrastructure, financial, etc), support systems, and stakeholders in order to design a successful and meaningful strategy, the authors said.