Jeroen van de Pol

27 Pharmacy in transition: A work sampling study of community pharmacists using smartphone technology 2 Introduction Worldwide, the role of community pharmacists is changing, shifting from the traditional preparation and distribution of medicines to the provision of cognitive pharmaceutical services (CPS). Both policy makers and professional pharmacy organizations emphasize the necessity of this transition for the future of the profession and for the benefit of the ageing population [1-6]. Population ageing will increase the need for healthcare provision, with increasing demands being made of all healthcare providers, especially when managing patients with multimorbidity and polypharmacy. Community pharmacists can have an important role as medicine experts in the increasingly demanding healthcare setting [7]. In current daily practice, community pharmacists are underutilized as a healthcare provider, even though their value to healthcare is widely recognized. New services, like medicines use reviews (MUR), discharge counselling or Inhaler Technique Assessment Service (ITAS) are incorporated slowly into community pharmacy practice [8]. Next to reimbursement issues, many community pharmacists encounter a lack of time in daily practice [9-11]. It is therefore important to gain insight into how much time community pharmacists devote to different activities and tasks. Earlier time utilization studies have shown that community pharmacists devote considerable time and effort to logistic processes, such as labelling and dispensing [6,12-21]. Work sampling is a generally accepted technique to obtain insight into time utilization and can be applied to assess the time community pharmacists invest in labelling and dispensing and direct patient care [22]. It is based on the assumption that a sufficient number of random observations enable a reliable estimate tobemade of the time spent ondifferent activities. However, these studies are time consuming for both participants and researchers and have therefore generally involved relatively small sample sizes. The advent of smartphones provides new possibilities for efficient data collection, by reducing the workload of work sampling by eliminating the need for trained external observers. This method is labor intensive and can cause a “Hawthorne” effect (participants changing their behavior as a consequence of the presence of an observer) [12]. Another possibility is to let participants estimate their time commitment to specific activities, but this method is considered unreliable due to recall bias [12]. The aim of this study is to assess the amount of time community pharmacists spend on different activities (taking into account whether these activities are professional, semi-professional or non-professional) and how these activities are divided over the workweek.