Question

Case:

The Night-Shift Pharmacist Maggie is a night shift staff pharmacist at a large hospital. Staff pharmacists work in the main pharmacy with limited patient and physician contact and spend much of their time on computers verifying orders and checking the medication counters. Collaborative care pharmacists round with the medical team and visit each patient daily. They help with discharge medication counseling and teach pharmacy students. However, being on the night shift provides some unique aspects for work and job design; some of these are discussed next. After a patient enters the emergency room, Maggie is in charge of the medications they receive. She hand-checks every medication that goes into the automated dispensing cabinets in the emergency rooms to make sure nurses have easy access to accurate, non-expired medications. When an order for an emergency medication comes through, she tells the entire pharmacy team that it is top priority to get the medication to the emergency room as quickly as possible. When a patient is admitted from the emergency room, it is her responsibility to review the home medications continued by the admitting physician to find any discrepancies between what was ordered and what they actually take to prevent errors while the patient is away from their normal routine. When a code blue is called, she responds to the patient’s room with a medication cart. Maggie routinely passes along information to make sure nothing slips through the cracks during shift change. She has the responsibility to ensure that questions are followed up and also to report medication errors to the administration. In any given night, she might be found counting all of the narcotics being replenished in automated dispensing cabinets one second and attending a pediatric intubation in the emergency room the next. She tries to read an article from a medical journal each day to keep herself abreast of upcoming changes that might affect her job. Being on the night shift, she does not have the leisure to consult other physicians or pharmacists. If she has a question, she must research it and formulate her own opinion before consulting someone else. She prioritizes her own tasks. If our medication robot breaks down, she has to make the decision as to what the workflow will be until the issue is fixed. Working nights, however, makes it difficult to obtain feedback about her decisions. Without that feedback, she can’t tell if her intuition was right, especially for decisions that must be made rapidly. Staff pharmacists are different from collaborative care pharmacists.

Please Answer: How would you assess her motivation and engagement in view of the concepts and theories (Baldrige Category 5: Work force engagment and performance) we discussed in this module? How might her organization improve her job design and what implications might this have?

Answer 1

Her motivation and engagement in view of theories and concepts cis can be assessed in the following way

• Her willingness and eagerness to know new things and stay updated
• Reading articles, theories not only improve her reading skill but to be aactive throughout nifnight shift
• Her sincerity can be assessed by her perfection

Her organization can improve her job design by by implicating education program, make her connect with the physician in the morning shift at least once a week,Can reduce her work load by providing a colleague or assistant in the role.