Objectives: To describe community pharmacists' work activities in the United States during 2000 and to investigate the effects of position, pharmacy type, and prescription volume on work activities.
Design: Cross-sectional descriptive survey of a systematic sample of 4,895 U.S. pharmacists, of which 2,250 responded.
Setting: United States.
Participants: A sample of 832 community pharmacists working full-time (at least 30 hours per week) out of the total of 2,250 who responded to the survey.
Interventions: Not applicable.
Main outcome measures: Workload (hours worked and proportion of prescriptions dispensed at the site with which the pharmacist was personally involved) and professional responsibilities (proportion of time spent in medication dispensing, consultation, business management, and drug use management).
Results: As of 2000, the typical community pharmacist in the United States devoted 56% of his or her time to medication dispensing responsibilities, 19% to consultation responsibilities, 16% to business management responsibilities, and 9% to drug use management responsibilities. These results were consistent for pharmacists regardless of pharmacy type or prescription volume; however, position did significantly affect the proportion of time spent in the various activities.
Conclusion: Pharmacists are still devoting the majority of their time to medication dispensing responsibilities. However, our findings also show that pharmacists would prefer to devote more of their time to professional responsibilities, such as consultation and drug use management, and less time to medication dispensing and business management.