(1360) Community Pharmacists' Work Activities After COVID: Results from the 2022 National Pharmacist Workforce Survey

Objectives: Since the start of COVID in March 2020, community pharmacists have expanded their work activities to meet the needs of their work environments, patients, and communities. The goals of this study are to describe how much time community pharmacists spend in work activities, how the time that they spend in work activities has changed since March 2020, how much of their patient care activities is appointment based, and how satisfied they are with the time they spend in work activities.

Methods: A descriptive online survey collected data for the 2022 National Pharmacist Workforce Survey (NPWS) from a random sample of 93,990 US licensed pharmacists. Respondents practicing pharmacy in community settings reported the percent of time during a typical week that they spent performing activities in each of six broad categories. Additionally, they reported the number of weekly hours spent providing nine specific work activities, how much the amount of time they spent in each activity changed from March 2020 and their satisfaction with the time they spent each week in the specific work activities. For respondents who reported being not at all or partly satisfied, an open-ended question was included to describe the primary source of their dissatisfaction. Respondents reported the proportion of total time for each of four patient care services that is appointment-based. From a total of 4,947 usable responses, 1,971 respondents reporting practicing in a community pharmacy setting were analyzed. Responses to the open-ended question were coded into work system domains (i.e., people, tasks, tools and technology, physical environment, organizational context) from the SEIPS 2.0 Model. Cross tabulations of each study variable by community pharmacy practice setting type were determined to test for significant associations or differences.

Results: The largest proportion of respondents (38.2%) reported practicing in a large chain setting. Overall, respondents spent 75.3% of their workweek providing patient care services associated with dispensing medications to patients. Respondents practicing in independent/small chain pharmacies spent significantly more time providing non-dispensing patient care services (12.7%) relative to the other practice settings. Overall, 44.2% of respondents reported spending over 11 hours per week administering vaccines. Approximately 60% of all respondents reported spending up to 10 hours per week providing medication therapy management or medication synchronization. Of all respondents, 26.7% reported spending more than 11 hours each week consulting with patients about their drug coverage. Overall, 82% of respondents were using appointments to provide all patient care services and 47% were using appointments for medication synchronization. The use of appointments differed significantly across settings. Most respondents reported that their time spent in each specific patient care activity stayed the same or decreased while their time spent in each administrative service stayed the same or increased since March 2020. A significantly larger proportion of respondents practicing in independent/small chain settings (61.9%) were satisfied with their time spent in work activities compared to respondents in large chain (23.8%), mass merchandiser (23.1%) and grocery (29.2%) settings. The most common category of reasons for dissatisfaction with time spent in work activities was related to tasks (i.e., having too many tasks to accomplish, spending too much time providing vaccines), followed by reasons related to people (i.e. not having enough technician and pharmacist staff).

Conclusions: The results show that since early 2020, community pharmacists have been maintaining or reducing time spent in specific patient care services and significant dissatisfaction in time spent in work activities. There has been variability across community pharmacy setting types in their time demands and associated satisfaction with time spent. How community pharmacies manage their work systems to engage pharmacists in patient care services is an important topic of future research.