The voting system for the summit was developed with two major aims: first to keep a balance between the groups and second to differentiate the levels of agreement in order to identify implementation priorities.

As the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists (EAHP) has 34 members, each with a vote, first it was necessary to weight the votes of patient groups and other healthcare professionals (HCP; ie, physicians and nurses) to achieve a 50:25:25 balance. Each association attending the summit had one delegate. Thus pharmacists had a total 34 votes, while patients and HCP had 17 each. The aim was to avoid one group overruling another through numerical superiority. As 31 EAHP members ultimately attended the summit, this proportion was changed to 31:15.5:15.5. The weighting factor was calculated with the formula:

As 12 patient groups attended the summit, their vote was weighted by

And as seven HCP associations attended the summit, their vote was weighted by

In this way it was impossible for pharmacists to overrule the decisions of patients and HCP just because they were in a majority.

Voting on a statement was only valid if at least 90% of the delegates expressed their opinion. Thus, out of the 31+12+7=50 delegates, at least 45 had to vote. A quorum was achieved for all statements and for 34 statements (77%) all delegates voted.

The delegates voting had four choices: strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed and strongly disagreed. Each possibility was weighted by points ranging from +2 (strongly agreed) to −1 (strongly disagreed).

Strong agreement was defined as ≥85% of the maximum number of points, that is, 85% of the points achievable if all voting delegates had strongly agreed:

Agreement …