The collaboration between nurses and pharmacy technicians on nursing wards
In Dutch hospitals pharmacy technicians work on a daily basis on nursing wards to be able to carry out their work close to the patient, nurse and doctor.
Despite its implementation, there is still a lack of understanding of the added value of collaboration between pharmacy technicians and nurses and the desired improvements.
Objective
We ask pharmacy technicians, pharmacists and nurses what they think of their collaboration and what could be improved. This project is also conducted in Belgian hospitals. We compare the differences and similarities in cooperation and improvements.
Results
We know that patient safety improves because of the technicians’ focus, which is specifically on medicines. This way nurses can shift their focus to other care provision. There is more communication in the collaboration and this is perceived as pleasant. A few prerequisites were mentioned, such as more working space.
Approach
We did individual interviews with seven pharmacy technicians, three pharmacists and nine nurses on different nursing wards of two hospitals.
Collaboration with students
We collaborated with two of our students for this project (pharmaceutical and nurse practioner students at the time).
Sanae Ouhamou and Judith van de Crommert
