Jeroen van de Pol

76 Chapter 3 subset of community pharmacists responded to partake in this research and therefore limiting the generalizability of the results found in this study. Q-methodology also comes with limitations. First, Q-methodology is not designed to provide the precise prevalence of the different groups found. So, the distribution of participants has to be interpreted reservedly. Also, Q-methodology ranks individual activities. However, combining activities into several activity groups is arbitrary. Participants were given the explicit instruction to disregard all current limitations in daily community pharmacy practice and to prioritize based on a desired situation. A possible limitation of the study could be that participating pharmacists found it difficult to prioritize activities without their knowledge of the current limitations in community pharmacy practice. Also, due to the cross sectional design of this study, results found are a snapshot in time. However, we do not expected that task prioritization will change rapidly, as participants were explicitly asked to prioritize based on a desired situation and not on their current situation. Conclusion Previous studies showed that community pharmacists spend little time on CPS, but were not clear on whether community pharmacist prefer to devote more time to the provision of CPS. This study shows that the group that prioritizes CPS the highest, also contains the majority of participating pharmacists. All participating community pharmacists give low priority to logistics and pharmacy management, whereas previous studies have shown that in daily practice substantial time is devoted to these activities. Policymakers and the pharmacy profession should join forces to delegate the latter activities in order to enable community pharmacists to increase their commitment to CPS. Acknowledgements The authors like to thank Jurjen Geljon for his contribution in this research. Conflicts of interest None. Funding This study did not receive any funding.