Innovations-Magazine-June-July-2022 - 6

INTERVIEW WITH A BOARD EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Jack W. " Jay " Campbell IV, JD, RPh
Executive Director, North Carolina Board of Pharmacy
How long have you served as
executive director? What was
your prior role?
I have served as executive director for 16
years. Prior to my service on the Board,
I practiced as an appellate litigator in
Washington, DC, and Charlotte, NC.
North Carolina
Board of Pharmacy
Number of Board
Members
5 pharmacist members
and 1 public member
Number of
Compliance
Officers/Inspectors
13
Rules & Regulations
Established by
Board of Pharmacy
What is one of the most significant
issues that your Board addressed in
the past year?
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
pandemic response has consumed the bulk of
the North Carolina Board's time and effort
over the past two years. Key areas of regulatory
focus included empowering the expansion of
remote pharmacy practice to reduce the risk
of COVID-19 transmission among pharmacy
personnel and patients, facilitating crossjurisdictional
practice to mitigate the risk of
pharmacy manpower shortages, and guiding
implementation of expanded pharmacy practice
created by Public Readiness and Emergency
Preparedness Act (PREP Act) declarations.
Number of
Pharmacist Licensees
17,284
Number of
Pharmacies
3,513 (in-state)
Number of Wholesale
Distributors
Not regulated
by the Board
What actions were taken by the
Board to address the issues?
North Carolina law affords the Board a broad
authority to waive provisions of the Pharmacy
Practice Act and its regulations in times of
declared emergencies, where those waivers are
necessary to ensure the continuity of providing
pharmacy services to the public. The Board
has a standard " baseline " emergency services
waiver that it created several years ago and
preemptively authorizes any time a state of
emergency is declared. Though designed with
a natural disaster in mind, the baseline waiver's
provisions are aimed at preserving operational
continuity and applied well to pandemic
circumstances. The Board continued to
monitor developments and, as necessary, issued
supplements to the baseline waiver - mostly
focused on authorizing broad-based remote
pharmacy practice options. Expanded remote
pharmacy operations - both intra-pharmacy
and inter-pharmacy in nature - proved popular.
As a result, the Board recently completed
rulemaking to permanently expand remote
pharmacy operation authority across all practice
4 | JUNE/JULY 2022
types. That rulemaking also led the Board to
adopt NABP Verify as an alternative to licensure
for out-of-state pharmacists performing certain
remote medication order processing services
on behalf of North Carolina pharmacies -
the first state to do so. Because PREP Act
expansions will go away once the federal
public health emergency ends, the Board has
worked closely with stakeholders and legislators
to preserve these expansions in state law.
What other key issues has the
Board been focusing on?
The Board has had an active rulemaking
docket over the past year. The Board
has completed - or is in the process of
completing - rulemaking to implement
newly granted pharmacist authority to
administer long-acting injectables; create a
new pharmacy intern registration system that
includes an online method for recording and
validating non-curricular experiential hours;
and clarify and simplify eligibility criteria for
" limited service " pharmacy permits.
What insights do you have for
other states that may be facing
similar challenges?
If there is a silver lining to the COVID-19
pandemic, it is that stresses on pharmacy
provoked needed (and often long overdue)
reevaluations of the ways that practice is
regulated and empowered. Leaning on the
experience and input of colleagues at other
state boards has been crucial - and appreciated.
The experience and input of public health
officials in other North Carolina agencies,
particularly the Department of Health and
Human Services, has also helped shape and
focus these reevaluations productively. NABP's
fostering of dialogue among the state boards
and the creation of new tools to oversee
increasingly multi-jurisdictional practice issues
has been invaluable. All of this is to say that
none of us is an island (I do not mean this
literally, of course. I see you Hawaii, United
States Virgin Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico!),
and our regulatory opportunities and challenges
have much in common. Reach out - broadly,
early, and often.
Innovations-Magazine-June-July-2022

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