Jeroen van de Pol

29 Pharmacy in transition: A work sampling study of community pharmacists using smartphone technology 2 If pharmacists were unable to categorize their activities, they could enter free text, which was recoded by the authors (JvdP, MB) after data collection was finished. Free texts that could not be interpreted by the authors were excluded. The risk of misclassification was assessed in a pilot study by asking eight practising community pharmacists to classify 50 activities into one of the main categories listed in table 1. The agreement between the eight pharmacists, and between the pharmacists and the categorization made by the researchers, was assessed. Kappa was calculated for both situations to adjust for chance agreement. The agreement between the eight pharmacists had a Fleiss’ kappa of 0.799. On the basis of this result, the researchers made the final categorization. There was substantial agreement between the eight pharmacists and the final categorization (Cohen’s kappa 0.71–0.93) [24]. Ethics and confidentiality The research proposal was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Utrecht University. The smartphone application provided each participant with a unique user code . These codes could not be linked to identifiers of individual participants. Acquired data were anonymous and treated as confidential. Data analysis The data were collected on an online server using Microsoft Excel and analyzed using Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and SPSS 23.0. The number of registered activities is expressed as the mean and median percentage of the total number of registered activities and interquartile range. Percentages can be converted to actual time dedicated to each activity [18]. Activities were classified in three levels based on the necessity of the professional skills of a pharmacist to perform the activity: professional, semi-professional, and non-professional. A professional activity needs the specific expertise of a pharmacist; semi-professional activities can be delegated to pharmacy technicians under the supervision of a pharmacist; and non-professional activities do not require the expertise of either a pharmacist or pharmacy technician. Consensus on the classification of activities was reached by a panel of six practising community pharmacists (see supplementary material table 1).