System to measure the use of pharmacy personnel

The development of a program to monitor the use of pharmacy personnel is described. The program is part of a hospital-wide Labor Information System developed to support requests for additional staff, to highlight opportunities for improved and allocation of manpower, and to serve as a conceptual model of the department from a manpower perspective when communicating with other members of the hospital organization. Nine major functions of the pharmacy department were identified. Detailed activities for each function were listed along with the type of personnel who performed each activity. Standards representing the amount of time spent on each activity were then developed. Variable, fixed, and open standards were used. Workload volumes are tabulated on a biweekly basis and entered into a computer. Payroll data covering the same period are simultaneously fed into the computer system. The resulting computer-generated report compares the service hours necessary to perform the actual workload (based on the predetermined time standards) to the available hours actually worked by each job category of pharmacy personnel. The ratio of service hours to available hours measures the use of personnel by functional activity. The system has been successfully applied to support requests for additional personnel, to forecast staffing needs for new programs, and to make operational improvements. In addition, the system has the capacity to accurately monitor personnel time for providing clinical services.