How Hospital Pharmacists Spend Their Time: A Work-Sampling Study

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.

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.

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.

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%).

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.