Article Text
Abstract
Background The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) in Ireland are currently promoting and guiding the development of key performance indicators and minimum data sets to monitor health care quality. A third of Irish hospital pharmacies surveyed in 2006 believed that performance indicators were the most effective quality assessment tool. Despite this, performance indicators for clinical pharmacy services in Ireland have not been published.
Purpose To obtain consensus on whether performance indicators identified from the literature provide a valid and feasible method of measuring the quality of the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital (MMUH) clinical pharmacy service and whether they could be introduced as a regular quality measurement.
Materials and Methods Review the literature relating to the use of performance indicators in a clinical pharmacy setting and identify performance indicators which have been piloted or used in other institutions.
Achieve consensus of a multidisciplinary panel, using a Delphi method of the most valid and feasible performance indicators for the MMUH clinical pharmacy service
Implement one of the selected performance indicators
Make recommendations on the further use of performance indicators
Results Performance indictors relating to hospital pharmacy are available (n = 240) in the literature.
The Delphi method achieved consensus and rated the following three performance indicators as both valid and feasible:
Percentage of reserve antimicrobials checked by a clinical pharmacy for approval by microbiology or infectious diseases
Percentage of patients discharged on warfarin who receive warfarin counselling by a clinical pharmacist
Percentage of medication orders for intermittent therapy that have been reviewed by a clinical pharmacist for safe prescribing.
The indicator chosen for measurement was the percentage of medication orders for intermittent therapy that were reviewed by a clinical pharmacist for safe prescribing. A 79% compliance with this performance indicator was achieved by the clinical pharmacy service.
Conclusions A multidisciplinary panel achieved consensus that three of the performance indicators identified from the literature provide valid and feasible methods of measuring the quality of the clinical pharmacy service of the MMUH. One of these was successfully implemented and consideration will be given to implementing further performance indicators
No conflict of interest.