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Abstract

Introduction: A competent workforce is essential for an effective health care system. In order to maintain clinical competence in an area of practice, individuals must possess and maintain a therapeutic knowledge base sufficient to provide appropriate care to patients. Hypothesis: Implementation of a pharmacy department critical care resource increases pharmacists’ competence and/or clinical confidence when evaluating medication therapy in critically ill patients. Methods: This is a single center, survey based study conducted at a large, academic teaching hospital. As part of a formative survey, all inpatient pharmacists (N=106) were queried to establish need for a critical care resource and to assess topics of interest. Identified topics and requested material were compiled and developed into an electronically available resource on the department’s intranet. Pharmacists staffing critical care areas (N=50) were then requested to complete a pre- and post- survey that included both clinically based objective questions as well as subjective questions relating to their level of confidence before and after the resource’s implementation. Results: Twenty pharmacists (40%) voluntarily participated in the assessment survey process, however only 50% appropriately completed both the pre- and post-implementation surveys. After implementation of the critical care resource, 84% of responses to the objective questions were correct compared to 76% pre-implementation. 80% of responders utilized the critical care resource to aid in answering the clinical questions on the post-implementation survey. Sedation, analgesia, antibiotic selection, and endocrine were critical care concepts with the most improvement in the number of correct responses between the pre- and post-implementation surveys. 90% of responders rated their comfort level in answering critical care pharmacotherapy questions as slightly or extremely comfortable after the resource became available. Conclusions: The resource was positively received and there was an observed overall increase in pharmacists’ competence and clinical confidence after the implementation. Future plans are to use this resource to help develop a formal written critical care competency assessment tool.