Determining staffing requirements in institutional pharmacy

What do community pharmacists do?: results from a work sampling study in London

“…However, data about the number of other staff present during each time period was collected to allow for analysis of the effects of staff on the allocation of roles, as well as the average number of prescriptions dispensed per month (Table ). In situations where the pharmacist was performing more than one activity simultaneously, the observers made a subjective decision about which activity predominated as practiced in previous studies …”

“…In situations where the pharmacist was performing more than one activity simultaneously, the observers made a subjective decision about which activity predominated as practiced in previous studies. [27]…”

Effective use of workload and productivity monitoring tools in health-system pharmacy, part 1

“…Many pharmacy productivity workload ratios have been published, but most are based on simple labor efficiency metrics that are tied to orders processed, doses billed for, and full-time equivalents (FTEs) utilized per discharge. [7][8][9][10][11][12] In most cases, clinical activities are not included. To date, productivity monitoring articles in the pharmacy and health care literature have not emphasized activities related to pharmacist-provided patient care services or developing a pharmacy workload monitoring system that analyzes the effect of pharmacy services on overall patient outcomes, cost to the hospital, and quality of care.…”

“…13-20 A few published articles have described benchmarking applications for use in health-system pharmacies. 7,8,10,12,21 In general, these reports described methods for developing a comprehensive picture of the daily activities of clinical pharmacists and technicians. In 2000, Murphy 8 noted that benchmarking can help pharmacists understand the value and outcomes of their efforts and their colleagues' efforts and convince health care administrators of the value of pharmacy services.…”