Jeroen van de Pol

67 How community pharmacists prioritize cognitive pharmaceutical services 3 Introduction The role of the community pharmacist is shifting from traditional ‘product centered’ activities, such as compounding and dispensing, to a more ‘patient centered’ approach by providing cognitive pharmaceutical services (CPS) such as medication review and discharge counselling. Due to the ageing population and the increasing complexity of drug therapy, policy makers and professional bodies are of the opinion that this shift to CPS is necessary to maintain a sustainable healthcare system [1]. In the past 20 years, time utilization by community pharmacists has been studied multiple times in different countries. These studies generally show that community pharmacists spend a considerable amount of time on logistics and pharmacy management and are therefore less capable of focusing the available time on CPS. There seems to be limited change in community pharmacists time utilization over the past years [2-13]. Competing activities hamper the community pharmacist in the provision of CPS. This is emphasized by studies that aimed to introduce care related services in the community pharmacy setting. Pharmacists frequently complained about a lack of time to adequately implement these new services in their daily routine [1, 14-17]. The aforementioned studies gave insight in the actual time utilization, but most lack information about the preferences of community pharmacists regarding the amount of time spent on CPS. An important driver for time utilization in daily practice may be how community pharmacists ideally prioritize their daily activities. Therefore, the primary aim of this study was to identify how community pharmacists ideally would prioritize CPS compared to other daily recurring activities in the community pharmacy setting. Also, this study aimed to identify potential differences in task prioritization between community pharmacists. Methods Study design and population A cross-sectional study design with Q-methodology was used to identify different viewpoints regarding task prioritization in community pharmacy practice. Q-methodology, developed in the 1930’s, is useful to study both agreement and diverging opinions among participants [18, 19] and has been used in several other studies [20, 21]. By using Q-methodology it is possible to identify both shared