Services
Medication reviews
An appointment whose entire purpose is to go through everything you take, without anybody watching the clock.
What it actually is
You sit down with a pharmacist and go through every single thing you take — prescriptions, things bought off a shelf, vitamins, herbal remedies, whatever is in the drawer. What each one is for, whether it is still for that, how you actually take it as opposed to how the label says, and what it is costing you.
Ontario funds it, and it has a name — MedsCheck — which is worth knowing, because it is the word a prescriber will use when they tell you to ask for one. It is free, once a year, and you qualify if you take three or more prescription medications for an ongoing condition, or have type 1 or type 2 diabetes even if you take nothing for it, or live in a long-term care home. You need a valid OHIP card unless you are in long-term care. If you cannot get to a pharmacy and you take three or more of them, a pharmacist comes to you instead, and can clear the old medication out of the cabinet while they are there.
It exists because a prescription list assembled over fifteen years by six different prescribers has never once been looked at as a whole.
Nobody is checking whether your doctors made mistakes. The question is whether the list you ended up with is still the list you need.
What tends to come out of it
Something nobody stopped
Started for a reason that resolved years ago, renewed ever since because renewing is easier than asking. Extremely common and completely undramatic.
Two things doing one job
Usually because two prescribers each solved the same problem without seeing the other’s work. It is nobody’s fault and it is worth untangling.
A schedule nobody could keep
Four times a day around meals is a plan for somebody with four predictable meals. If the real schedule is different, the plan should be.
A cost nobody mentioned
Sometimes there is a covered alternative, sometimes a plan will pay with the right paperwork, and sometimes nobody ever asked whether you were paying at all.
A written summary
You leave with the list, in plain language, and it goes to your prescriber. Being able to hand somebody one accurate page is worth more than it sounds.
What will not happen
Nothing gets stopped or changed in the room. A pharmacist reviews and recommends; your prescriber decides. Anything worth changing goes to them with the reasoning attached, which is a faster route than you raising it at a ten-minute appointment.
Who it is worth it for
Anyone taking several medications, anyone who has just come out of hospital with a changed list, anyone whose prescriptions come from more than one place, anyone caring for somebody else and holding their list, and anyone who has quietly stopped taking something and has not said so.
That last one is worth saying out loud. Not taking something as prescribed is ordinary and it is information rather than a confession — a plan built on a list you are not actually following is a plan built on fiction.
Common questions
How long will it take?
Long enough to get through the list properly. It is booked as its own appointment rather than squeezed into a counter conversation, which is the entire point of it.
Do I need to bring everything?
Yes — the actual containers if you can, including the ones you are not sure about and the ones you are not taking. The bag-of-boxes approach works better than a list from memory.
Can someone come with me?
Yes. If you look after somebody else’s medications, this appointment is as much for you as it is for them.
Do I have to get my prescriptions here?
Kind Clinic and Kind Pharmacy are separate businesses under common ownership. You can fill your prescription anywhere. A review is worth having wherever you fill things, and it will be offered on that basis.
Where a review turns up something that needs a prescriber, Kind Clinic is on the second floor. Kind Clinic and Kind Pharmacy are separate businesses under common ownership. You can fill your prescription anywhere.
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