The Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Director of Nursing
(DON), Chief Pharmacist (CP), Quality and Risk Manager
(QRM) and senior management team member directly
accountable for pharmacy services (SMT) were chosen as
respondents for this study as they were the key decision
makers involved with medicines’ management in the hospital
setting, influencing resource allocation and the hospital’s
strategic direction. In addition, any KPIs that were adopted
would most likely report to this select group of staff so it
made sense that the surveys should encompass the end users’
perspectives. The draft survey was pre-tested with a conve-
nience sample of one local hospital consisting of one staff
member from each respective discipline: medical, nursing,
pharmacy, quality improvement and senior management.
Pilot respondents were not included in the study analysis.
Face validity and differences between the Delphi process and
convenience sample group were not tested. The stakeholder
groups found that the initial survey was quite lengthy in
nature, contained KPIs that could not have been totally
attributable to pharmacy services alone (e.g. patient mortality
rate, average length of stay) and were unclear of the differences between some of the KPIs (e.g. no. of medication
errors compared with ‘prescribing errors: identification and
resolution of unintentional departure from recommended
prescribing practices per patient bed day’).