Validation of a tool for reporting pharmacists' interventions in everyday community pharmacy

Abstract

What is known and objective: The French Society of Clinical Pharmacy (SFPC) asked a group of experts to adapt the SFPC hospital pharmacists' interventions reporting tool for use in community pharmacy practice. This study aimed to develop and validate a tool for the routine reporting of pharmacists' interventions in French community settings.

Methods: Two groups of community pharmacists coded reports of 60 typical pharmacists' interventions. One group was "experts" (n = 4) who had participated in the development of the tool (internal validation) and the other were "external" community pharmacists (n = 6), naïve to the tool (external validation). The Kappa coefficient was used to assess the inter-reliability of classification between participants. A 4-level Likert scale was used to evaluate ease of use and acceptability.

Results and discussion: The tool we developed for recording and classifying PIs has 19 items; 11 non-ordered categories describing drug-related problems; and 7 items describing interventions. Two tables of definitions were provided to help community pharmacists in the classification. The mean κ statistic was (i) 0.63 for experts and 0.73 for external community pharmacists in categorizing drug-related problems and (ii) 0.69 for experts and 0.75 for external community pharmacists in categorizing interventions.

What is new and conclusion: A specific tool for the documentation of pharmacists' interventions in community pharmacies is now available in French. Besides being useful to describe pharmacists' interventions in studies in community settings, it can be used to document the pharmaceutical patient record and to support the traceability process.

Keywords: clinical pharmacy; community pharmacy; drug-related problems; pharmacists' intervention; pharmacy practice.