CCAPP Accreditation for Canadian Pharmacy Programs: A Coordinator's Guide

You run a pharmacy program in Canada, and CCAPP is on your calendar — as your next site visit, or as the first review of a new program. The process has more moving parts than most coordinators are told: several distinct award types, a self-study with specific formatting rules, and a visiting team that reads your strategic plan as carefully as your curriculum.

This is a practical guide to CCAPP accreditation for Canadian pharmacy programs: what the council accredits, the five steps of the process, the award types you’ll actually meet, what the current PharmD standards ask for in evidence, and how to write a self-study that survives review. Everything below is drawn from CCAPP’s own website [1] [2] and its accreditation standards for Canadian PharmD programs (2023 revised edition) [3].

A pharmacy teaching laboratory with student benches and equipment

Who CCAPP Is and What It Accredits

The Canadian Council for Accreditation of Pharmacy Programs “sets standards for pharmacy and pharmacy technician education programs; grants accreditation awards to programs that meet the standards; and promotes continuous improvement of accredited programs.” [1]

The council is not an academic body. It is composed of representatives appointed by six organizations — including the Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada, the Canadian Pharmacists Association, the Pharmacy Examining Board of Canada, and the National Association of Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities — plus a non-pharmacy member. Non-academic appointees form a majority of the board, which establishes the accreditation standards, sets policy, and manages the accreditation process. [1]

CCAPP currently accredits pharmacy academic programs offered at eleven Canadian universities, and a large number of pharmacy technician programs offered at community and regional public colleges and private career colleges. [1] The council also adds the term “International” to accreditation it confers on schools based outside Canada. [1]

Two distinctions matter. First, accreditation applies to programs — it is distinct from certification, registration, or licensure, which apply to individuals. Second, accreditation has direct consequences for your graduates: graduates of a CCAPP-accredited program may apply directly for the PEBC Qualifying Examination, while graduates of a non-accredited university degree program must first pass the PEBC Evaluating Examination. [1]

A faculty member supervising pharmacy students working in a laboratory

The Five Steps of the Process

In very general terms, CCAPP asks each school four things: define what it wants to achieve with its professional program; demonstrate that it has a program and the resources to produce those outcomes; have procedures for evaluating whether the desired outcomes are achieved; and have a plan for correcting deficiencies and incorporating new ideas. [2]

The process itself runs in five steps [2]:

The university applies. The application is composed of three sets of documents: the Application for Accreditation (personnel, budgets, enrolment); the Self-Assessment Report — the self-study, guided by the Examples of Evidence for each standard and focused on the present and the time since the last visit; and the Strategic Plan, focused on “where we want to go and how we plan to get there.”
A site visit. A four- or five-member team — a CCAPP board member, a dean, a pharmacy faculty member, and the CCAPP Chief Executive Officer — evaluates the program, with the appropriate provincial regulatory authority invited to appoint an observer. The team supplements the self-study, tests the feasibility of the strategic plan, and prepares a draft report.
The CEO prepares a final report on the school, submitted for consideration by the CCAPP board of directors.
The board decides the accreditation status, the term, and any conditions on the award.
The university’s president and dean are advised, and the accreditation status is published in the CCAPP Annual Directory.

Accreditation awards are granted for a term not exceeding six years — so every program lives inside an ongoing cycle of self-assessment, strategic planning, and external review. [2] CCAPP also charges an annual accreditation fee, posted on the council’s website.

The Award Types You’ll Actually Meet

Not every program arrives at a visit as an established one. Knowing where yours sits on CCAPP’s ladder of awards changes what the next cycle looks like [2]:

Qualifying accreditation — for a new program with no students enrolled but a dean or director appointed. It confirms that the university’s planning has taken CCAPP standards into account. It is permitted for up to four years, carries no rights or privileges of accreditation, and a program that admits and graduates students without applying during the term produces students who are not considered graduates of an accredited program.
Provisional accreditation — for a program with students enrolled but no class graduated yet. It ends when the first admitted class graduates, and those graduates are deemed by CCAPP to be graduates of an accredited program.
Accreditation — up to six years, granted when the program complies with the standards: appropriate program goals, adequate resources and organization, educational outcomes that indicate the goals are being met, and plans in place to keep them met.
Conditional accreditation — concerns about progress in addressing the standards. A progress report follows, and the board may move the program to Accredited if concerns are adequately addressed, or to Probation if satisfactory progress has not been achieved.
Probationary accreditation — non-compliance with standards, or minimal compliance over two or more survey cycles, resulting in serious weaknesses in a major component. The maximum term is eighteen months, an unannounced visit by CCAPP and ministry officials may occur at the program’s expense, and the institution must show cause within six months of notice.
Withdrawal of accreditation — effective immediately. The dean must immediately advise enrolled students, admitted applicants, and applicants; CCAPP notifies PEBC, all provincial pharmacy registrars, and the responsible provincial ministry.

During any accreditation term, every program must also submit an interim progress report at a date specified in the award letter — covering changes to the program, financial resources, and academic staff since the last internal review, steps taken on the site visit’s deficiencies, and progress on the strategic plan and on standards published since the last visit.

A pharmacy student using a microscope in a university laboratory

What the 25 Standards Ask For

CCAPP’s current standards for Canadian programs leading to the entry-to-practice PharmD degree are organized into three parts and 25 standards, followed by three appendices (foundational content, required practice skills, and required program components for evaluation) [3]:

Part I — Academic Program (Standards 1–7): educational outcomes, curriculum, and teaching, learning, and assessment.
Part II — Governance and Program Management (Standards 8–17): the university’s commitment, faculty organization and leadership, planning and continuous quality assurance, and admissions.
Part III — Resources (Standards 18–25): student services, human resources, practice site resources, financial resources, physical facilities, and information resources.

Three criteria show where the evidence pressure lands:

Criterion 1.1 asks that intended outcomes be based on the current AFPC “Educational Outcomes for First Professional Degree Programs in Pharmacy” and the current NAPRA “Professional Competencies for Canadian Pharmacists at Entry to Practice.” The evidence it names is a description of your program’s intended outcomes and their alignment to both.
Criterion 2.1 asks that the curriculum be based on intended outcomes, with an organized progression — and the evidence it names is, almost verbatim, what most coordinators spend the most time building: intended educational outcomes mapped to courses or course objectives. (Criterion 2.2 sets the floor: a minimum of four academic years, or the equivalent in hours or credits.)
Criterion 4.1 sets the practice-experience floor: a total of forty weeks (1,600 hours) minimum, of which introductory experiences involve at least 320 hours (8 weeks) of direct patient care, and the concluding period runs a minimum of thirty-two weeks (1,280 hours), including at least twenty-four weeks (960 hours) of full-time direct patient care in both primary and acute care.

Appendix 3 rounds it out: the program must have processes for evaluating, at a minimum, the curriculum, teaching and student assessment, outcomes — including national board exam results and feedback from students, alumni, employers, and regulators — resources, admissions, student support, and its own continuous improvement processes. And the standards explicitly encourage you to describe those evaluation processes rather than present all the underlying data.

Writing a Self-Study That Survives Review

CCAPP publishes general instructions for completing the self-study, worth reading before anyone writes a word [3]. The rules that trip programs up:

Start with an executive summary — an overview and reflection on strengths and areas of opportunity — as the first chapter of the report.
For each standard and criterion: provide the evidence (facts, findings), your analysis of that evidence relative to the criterion, and your assessment of strengths and areas requiring improvement.
Keep it tight: responses are limited to 250 words per criterion. Use tables and charts where appropriate, with referencing for the data, procedures, and policy behind them.
You don’t have to include everything. It is not necessary to provide all suggested examples of support documents — the onsite survey provides the opportunity for further evidence.
One document, one file. Reference appendices by name and hyperlink them; the final submission is one complete document, submitted electronically to the CCAPP CEO or via a secure server to the CEO and all surveyors. Once submitted, no further documentation is accepted unless CCAPP requests it.
A report consisting solely of appendices does not meet the requirements — the analysis has to be in the body of the report.
And counterintuitively: the final documents submitted to the site visit team should not include your own judgment of compliance (met, not met, partially met).

Most of these rules point at the same problem: the self-study is an analysis, and the analysis is only as good as the connections behind it. Every claim of alignment has to be traceable to a course, a document, or a data set — which is exactly the map you’ve been building in spreadsheets.

Between Visits: The Cycle That Keeps You Accredited

Site visits can be scheduled anywhere within the six-year term, and deferral is granted only in exceptional circumstances — so “visit season” can land on any year of your cycle. What keeps a program safe between visits is the routine: the interim progress report, the evaluation processes Appendix 3 expects to exist year-round, and the strategic plan that the visiting team will test for feasibility.

That’s also where the work pays for itself. When outcomes are mapped to courses, evidence is connected to the standards it supports, and gaps are visible at any time, the self-study becomes an assembly job instead of a discovery job — and the institutional knowledge survives whoever built it.

MapOutcomes was built for exactly this: one connected view of your program’s outcomes, courses, and evidence, with gap detection against the standards and exports that turn the evidence package into a single action. If you’d like to see it against your own standards, the fastest way to start is a short demo — no implementation required.

References

Canadian Council for Accreditation of Pharmacy Programs, "About CCAPP," CCAPP. [Online]. Available: https://ccapp.ca/about-ccapp/
Canadian Council for Accreditation of Pharmacy Programs, "Canadian University Degree Programs in Pharmacy," CCAPP. [Online]. Available: https://ccapp.ca/canadian-university-degree-programs-in-pharmacy/
Canadian Council for Accreditation of Pharmacy Programs, "Accreditation Standards for Canadian Educational Programs Leading to the Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) Degree (2023 Revised Edition, file dated April 2025)," CCAPP, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://ccapp.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/April10-2025_CCAPP-PharmD-Standards_ENG.pdf