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About this chapter
This chapter encourages the use of evidence across the whole of hospital pharmacy practice. It introduces the concept of knowledge brokering and argues that all activities including pharmacy management should be evidence based.
Introduction
The acronym GRIP was coined some 20 years ago in order to ‘Get Research into Practice’. In the previous chapters of Evidence-based Pharmacy we have discussed a variety of issues which inevitably have a leaning towards clinical activities. We see these principles being applicable across the whole range of activities from where pharmacists may be entirely department based at one end of the spectrum to the role of consultant pharmacists who are working almost entirely away from the pharmacy department.
We believe that evidence is important in all aspects of providing a pharmacy service and have stated that we are attempting to change attitudes so that practitioners attitudinally and intentionally set out to use evidence in their practice. So, can evidence be applied to all aspects of hospital pharmacy? We believe it can whether this is involved with procurement, provision of information or any other aspect of the complexity of hospital pharmacy management.
Decision making
For many of us, decisions are made based on opinion. Pharmacy managers run departments based on what in their view works or what was done by their predecessor. One of us (PW) remembers moving into a new job quite a few years ago. It was quickly apparent that the programming of the day’s work meant that staff were not covering their clinical pharmacy activities until late in the day such that most staff were working well beyond the closing time. When asked why this was so, the response was ‘we have always done it this way’. In addition, good working practice was hampered by the physical layout of the department. In this and similar cases, …
Footnotes
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.