Jeroen van de Pol

55 Balancing traditional activities and cognitivepharmaceutical services by community pharmacists: 2 trying to provide CPS [22]. This could also explain why pharmacists are hesitant to spend more time on CPS. This could also explain that relatively young locum pharmacists are spending more time on CPS due to the fact that their education focused more on the provision of CPS [23]. This in contrary to older (resident) pharmacists who’s education focused on (analytical) chemistry and compounding instead of pharmacotherapy and patient counselling. The results from this study also show that utilizing centralized prescription processing (CPP) does not influence the amount of time being spent on CPS. In the Netherlands, many pharmacists apply CPP that implies outsourcing of the preparation of a drug order and labelling to a central fill pharmacy. One of the benefits being that time normally devoted to picking and labelling in the pharmacy, can be redirected to other activities (hence CPS). Reason for the absence of this result could be due to staff reductions after the introduction of CPP and therefore not using CPP as a tool to redirect available time to CPS. Community pharmacists that state they have full control of their time utilization, spend as much time on CPS as community pharmacists who state they have only partial control. This could be an indication that pharmacists do not feel a need to spend more time on CPS. However, concurrently the majority of pharmacists stated to want to spent more time on direct patient contact (being part of CPS). This is in line with previous research that showed that community pharmacists want to spend more time on consultation and medication management and less time on activities concerning dispensing and business management [20, 21]. Notable result found in this study is that pharmacists belonging to group 1 are, next to spending less time on CPS, also less eager to spend more time on direct patient contact compared to pharmacists from group 2 and 3. This result implies that some community pharmacists within group 1 are consciously avoiding the provision of CPS. Studies, both from inside and outside the Netherlands also showed that pharmacists were positive about services such as CMR and discharge counselling, but were experiencing a lack of time, lack of sufficient supporting staff and insufficient reimbursement [24, 25]. The lack of focus on CPS that is predominantly present in group 1 can be detrimental. As policymakers and professional bodies are trying to redefine the role of community pharmacy practice in the Netherlands, to address societal needs and also ensuring a long-term future for the profession, community pharmacists such as those belonging to group 1 can hamper this process. On the other hand this was only a minority of all participants and furthermore we may also need pharmacists who concentrate on ‘back-office’ tasks. As long as these pharmacists are joined with more CPS oriented pharmacists there may not be an issue.