Northern Health has won an award for pioneering a new virtual health care project at G.R. Baker Memorial Hospital in Quesnel.
Northern Health’s Virtual Clinical Pharmacy Services Program (VCPS) won the Strengthening Health & Wellness award in this year’s Health Quality BC Awards, for how health care and pharmacy can be delivered through a virtual model.
“ We have a pharmacy technician, who goes and does an interview with the patient to find out if all their medications are the same or similar to what they had at home to optimize patient medications,” says Barb Falkner, the Pharmacy Professional Practice Lead for Northern Health, and the Project Lead on VCPS.
“We have a special iPad that the pharmacy tech will set up so the pharmacist can talk to the patient about their medications and help answer any questions.”
Falkner said the program, which started in November 2024 and ran four days a week until March 2025, “filled a gap in service” in Northern Health, which has had a shortage of pharmacists.
She said the program far exceeded the intial expectations to match the on site referrals at G.R Baker Memorial with other hospitals in the region.
“Initially we did not have an on site pharmacist on the ward, so our baseline for referrals was zero,” Falkner says, adding the total amount of referrals received during the pilot window reached 362.
“The referrals were higher than what we were getting at other hospitals. The staff at [G.R. Baker Memorial] were really supportive of the project, and the patients were great. They really wanted to talk with the pharmacists and appreciated getting the help.”
Patients were able to connect with a pharmacist living in a different community, and vice versa. Northern Health said more medications were prescribed and more patients were helped than they had been able to help before.
With winning the award and being able to showcase the methods of referrals and data, Falkner believes this virtual method is highly beneficial for rural areas across Canada. She hopes that this virtual method will become more available in difficult-to-recruit areas. Though face-to-face methods are still the preferred method.
“We’ll continue to keep recruiting to have people on site face-to-face, but in the meantime. We’re filling a gap of service, and I hope to have this at every single hospital that we have trouble recruiting to, so that there won’t be a gap in service anymore. So I’m really excited about it, and I’m really proud of the frontline staff that we’re able to do this and make it work so well.”
The pilot program is officially over; however, Falkner says that the VCPS is still ongoing at G.R. Baker Memorial Hospital, and Northern Health hopes to expand the program to other hospitals within 2026.
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