Workload of staffs in Outpatient Pharmacy Department / Mohd Khusairi Mat Akhir and Ahmad Kamal Mohd Fadzil

The purpose of this research is to identify the workload of staffs in out-patient pharmacy. From 46 staffs in this department, 42 of them are involved in the research to discover the problems. We used questionnaires which generated from various journals to solicit responses from participating respondents. The possibilities exists that not all questions and terms used in the questionnaires were interpreted the same way by each respondent, leading to possible misclassification bias. In order to make the questionnaires efficient and reduce respondent burden, we did a pilot study to 4 respondents to make sure of their understanding of our research objectives. We can conclude that the major problems of the workload are understaffing, management policies, difficulty of taking leave/off and deficiency of medicine stocks. Besides that, the problems arise from the research are insufficient break and lack of dispensing counter. This research also highlights the importance of costs related to high workloads such as loss of goodwill, errors and absence. The goal of the research is to help the pharmacy management to overcome the problems from time to time, in order to increase the quality of pharmacy services. We also examined resultant data to determine how of these workloads can be solved. These findings may be useful to the pharmacy management to take action on the workloads which being mentioned above.