Calculation = (A) ÷ (A plus B). Exclude C. Present as a percentage.
‘A’ = estimate of overall staff time deployed as a sum of all clinical activities i.e. those provided for individual patients on wards, in outpatient clinics, care homes and in domiciliary patient facing clinical roles e.g. counselling, drug history taking, medicines reconciliation, organising transfer of care, shared decision-making, prescribing, clinical validation, participation in ward rounds and multidisciplinary team working, medicines administration.
Note: facilitating ‘near patient’ medicines use at ward level including dispensing, use of patients’ own medicines etc. is inextricably linked to a technician’s clinical role and should be included in an estimate for A. However, satellite dispensaries on or near wards are simply dispensaries and are not clinical. Any dispensing/supply undertaken by a pharmacist at ward level should be excluded from estimates.
‘A’ should also include an estimate of resource that is contained within departments that provides clinical services for individual patients as defined e.g. medicines information i.e. query answering for specific patients; clinical validation undertaken in providing an aseptic dispensing service.
‘B’ = estimate of overall staff time deployed as a sum of all operational activities including: stock management, dispensing (including staff time working in satellite dispensaries on or near wards, but excluding ‘near patient’ dispensing/supply undertaken by technicians as described), procurement, aseptic dispensing, production, formulary support, administration, quality control, topping up, medicines information (excluding the estimate of individual patient directed resource in ‘A’ as described above).
‘C’ = resources deployed as chief pharmacist (or equivalent), medicines safety officer (or equivalent), clinical informatics (or equivalent), controlled drug Accountable Officer, quality assurance, audit, practice research, quality improvement and teaching time i.e. C ≠ A or B. These resources should not be included in the calculation.