Pharmacy Daily | Impacts of dispensing with distraction

A NEW study has found that distractions due to phone calls, face-to-face consumer inquiries and out-of-scope questions from staff impacted the dispensing process, pharmacists' workload, performance, wellbeing and patient wait times.

Led by Monash University's Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (FPPS), the comprehensive review of 51 studies investigated existing knowledge on the impact of interruptions and distractions in pharmacy practice.

While pharmacists play a crucial role in reducing medication-ordering errors, they can also contribute to dispensing errors, with research showing that interruptions and distractions during dispensing account for almost one in 10 of these errors.

The study team found that pharmacists experience interruptions and distractions at varying rates, ranging from five to 20 times per hour.

Intervention initiatives to address the issue fell into three main categories: adjusting the physical environment; altering workflow processes; and limiting direct access to pharmacists during dispensing.

The team suggested potential solutions could include having more than one pharmacist on duty, allowing one to focus on dispensing; or in sole-pharmacist practices, moving the pharmacist to a checking-only role and leaving the dispensing to technicians.

FPPS Undergraduate Pharmacy Course Director, A/Prof Dan Malone, said that although the inclusion of intervention tactics in some studies is encouraging, there remains a strong need for education programs to better prepare pharmacy students for the types of interruptions they will experience when they enter the workforce.

"Dispensing medicines is an integral service provided by pharmacists and is a professional competency that combines specialised knowledge, functional and behavioural skills, and clinical judgment," A/Prof Malone said.

"As the custodians of medicine safety, educating future pharmacists on how to manage interruptions and distractions during the dispensing process can play a critical role in mitigating risk of errors."

Lead author and pharmacist Meaza Ayanaw is undertaking a PhD focusing on using a dispensing simulation to generate data on the impact of interruptions and distractions on task prioritisation and clinical decision-making ability of pharmacy students.

"Our hope is that one of the main outcomes from our combined research initiatives in this space will be to better understand how key elements of pharmacy practice are influenced by interruptions and distractions and, as such, what we can do to help prepare students for the real world," Ayanaw said.

Read the paper HERE. KB