How Hospital Pharmacists Spend Their Time: A Work-Sampling Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The expanded scope of pharmacist practice allows for increased comprehensive care and improved patient outcomes at the cost of increased workload and time demands on pharmacists. There are limited descriptive metrics for the time that pharmacists spend on various activities during the workday. An evaluation of the time spent on different activities would allow for potential optimization of workflow, with a focus primarily on devoting more time to direct patient care activities.Objective: To quantify the amount of time that hospital and clinic-based pharmacists spend on clinical activities, including direct and indirect patient care, and nonclinical activities. Methods: An observational fixed-interval, work-sampling study was conducted at 2 hospitals, Vancouver General Hospital and Richmond Hospital, both in British Columbia. Trained observers followed individual pharmacists for a set period. The pharmacists’ activities were recorded in 1-min increments and classified into various categories. Results: In total, 2044 min of activity, involving 11 individual pharmacists, were observed. Clinical activities accounted for 82% of total time, 12% (251 min) on direct patient care activities and 70% (1434 min) on indirect patient care activities. The most common direct clinical activity was conducting patient medication history interviews (73 min; 4% of total time), and the most common indirect clinical activity was assessment and evaluation (585 min; 29%). The most common nonclinical activities were walking (91 min; 4% of total time), looking for something (57 min; 3%), and teaching pharmacy students on practicum (60 min; 3%). Conclusions: Although the pharmacists spent most of their time on clinical activities, face-to-face time with patients (direct clinical activities) seemed low, which highlights an area for potential improvement. The pharmacists spent much more time documenting information in pharmacy-specific monitoring forms (i.e., assessment and evaluation) than they spent writing notes or recommendations in the chart, for sharing with other health care professionals. Keywords: time, work sampling, pharmacist, activitiesRÉSUMÉContexte : L’élargissement du champ d’activité du pharmacien permet d’améliorer la qualité des soins et les résultats pour le patient au prix d’une augmentation de la charge et du temps de travail des pharmaciens. Il existe peu de mesures descriptives temps que les pharmaciens consacrent à leurs diverses activités de la journée. Une évaluation de ce temps permettrait d’optimiser le flux de travail afin que l’accent puisse être mis principalement sur l’augmentation du temps réservé aux activités de soins directs des patients.Objectif : Quantifier le temps que passent les pharmaciens des hôpitaux et des cliniques à effectuer des activités cliniques, y compris des activités de soins directs et indirects, ainsi que des activités non cliniques.Méthodes : Une étude observationnelle par échantillonnage à intervalles fixes a été menée dans deux hôpitaux : le Vancouver General Hospital et le Richmond Hospital, tous deux en Colombie-Britannique. Des observateurs formés ont suivi chaque pharmacien en particulier pendant une période déterminée. Leurs activités étaient consignées par tranches d’une minute et classées en diverses catégories.Résultats : L’observation a porté sur des activités totalisant 2044 minutes réparties entre 11 pharmaciens. Les activités cliniques représentaient 82 % du temps total, 12 % (251 min) des activités étaient consacrées aux soins directs et 70 % (1434 min), aux soins indirects. L’activité clinique directe la plus courante consistait à mener des entrevues portant sur les antécédents pharmacothérapeutiques des patients (73 min, 4 % du temps total) et l’activité clinique indirecte la plus courante était l’évaluation (585 min, 29 %). Les activités non cliniques les plus courantes étaient la marche (91 min, 4 % du temps total), la recherche de quelque chose (57 min, 3 %) et la formation des étudiants stagiaires en pharmacie (60 min, 3 %).Conclusions : Bien que les pharmaciens consacrent la plus grande partie de leur temps à des activités cliniques, le temps passé auprès des patients (activités cliniques directes) semblait faible, ce qui indique une possibilité d’amélioration. Les pharmaciens passent beaucoup plus de temps à consigner de l’information dans des formulaires de contrôle spécifiques à la pharmacie (c.-à-d. évaluation) qu’à rédiger des notes ou des recommandations dans les tableaux pour les partager avec les autres professionnels de la santé.Mots-clés : temps, échantillon de travail, pharmacien, activités
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".