Jeroen van de Pol

49 Balancing traditional activities and cognitivepharmaceutical services by community pharmacists: 2 Aim of the study The aim of this study was to identify characteristics of community pharmacists that spend a higher proportion of their time on CPS and to identify activities that compete with time spent on CPS by community pharmacists. Ethics approval The research proposal was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Utrecht University. The study used a smartphone application called FarmaCheck [11] which provided each participant with a unique user code and could not be linked to individual participants. Data was anonymous and treated as confidential. Method Study design A cross-sectional study design was used with a work-sampling technique based on self-report of activities at random intervals as described in an earlier paper [11]. In short, participants were provided with a smartphone application to register activities during daily community pharmacy practice. Participants Practicing community pharmacists were recruited through the Utrecht Pharmacy Practice network for Education and Research (UPPER) [11, 19]. Data collection During the study period (from January till July 2016), participating community pharmacists registered their daily activities using a smartphone application called ‘FarmaCheck’. This application asked participants at five random times per workday to register their current activity. Pharmacists were asked to do this during six consecutive weeks [11]. To get insights in the background characteristics of participants, each pharmacist was asked to fill in a brief online survey. Data analysis Outcome measures Proportions of time spent on different activities was obtained by dividing the number of times a certain activity was chosen in the smartphone application by the total number of registered activities. Activities were categorized into five activity groups. These five activity groups were comprised of similar activities that