The time spent by clinical pharmacists on various activities was measured using a multidimensional work-sampling method to identify their work activities and the staff requirements. This study was conducted over a 10-day period using, as study subjects, two clinical pharmacists working in the surgical wards of a hospital (50 beds each). To analyze the work activities, the hospital pharmacy work was carefully classified, categorized, defined and coded based on information obtain from pharmaceutical studies and interviews conducted during the study.
During the study period, 9, 592 observations were collected. The results showed that the study subjects (clinical pharmacists) spent 78.6% of their time or about 6.3 hours per day performing clinical activities. The major work activities included the following : (1) giving instructions and consultations to patients (23.6%); (2) reviewing and assessing the patients' charts and performing drug-use reviews (21.4%); (3) sharing patient information with staff (15.4%); (4) managing drug information (9.9%). On average, a pharmacist provided service to 15.0 patients each day and spent 7.2 minutes with each patient providing inpatient-consultation services. The results showed time variations ranging from 1.0 to 38.5 minutes in the inpatient-consultation activities and a further study was required to investigate the relationship between the casual time variation and the patient's characteristics. In fact, the two pharmacists of this study were able to provide consultation services to only 76.9% of the inpatients in their wards.
In conclusion, the results of this study revealed that hospital pharmacists had insufficient time to provide adequate clinical services to all patients. Therefore, staff requirements should be estimated based on the time required to be spent by a pharmacist on each patient while also considering variations in each patient's needs and characteristics.
