Work redesign and role restructuring in a pharmacy department with pharmacist assistants

A new staffing model for decentralized pharmacists and support staff at a university hospital is described. A new technical support position--the pharmacist assistant--was created, and activities were reallocated among the pharmacists, pharmacist assistants, and pharmacy technicians according to the recommendations of two total quality management teams. Pharmacist assistants were to perform many of the drug distribution and record-keeping functions previously performed by pharmacists. The activities marked for reallocation accounted for about 50% of pharmacist time in the existing staffing model; they would not be performed by experienced pharmacy technicians who received brief training to be pharmacist assistants. Nine pharmacists and nine technicians tested the new staffing model on four patient care units over a four-week period. The reassignment of pharmacist tasks to pharmacist assistants theoretically gave pilot-unit pharmacists more time for providing and documenting patient-specific clinical activities and an additional 12 hours a week to participate in such global patient care activities as critical-pathway and quality improvement meetings. By the end of the study, the pharmacist assistants demonstrated that they could perform the reassigned activities; however, the pharmacists were not yet confident in the assistants' ability to do so. A pilot study of a new decentralized pharmacy staffing model demonstrated that technical support personnel can perform many distributive and record-keeping activities traditionally performed by decentralized pharmacists.