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Despite €repeated attempts€ to encourage further pharmaceutical services, community pharmacists still spend most of their time on technical dispensing, says a report in the International Journal of Pharmacy Practice.

Trained observers visited 10 community pharmacies in London and classified every minute of activity into one of 18 €predefined, piloted and tested€ codes. Data was collected for four hours each day for one week at each pharmacy during 2011, usually between Monday to Friday (96.6 per cent), but also on Saturday (1.95 per cent) and Sunday (1.46 per cent).

Pharmacists spent most of their time assembling and labelling products (median 25.2 per cent) and monitoring prescriptions for clinical appropriateness (10.6 per cent).

They spent more time on endorsing and health-related clerical work (8.7 per cent) and on rest, waiting and personal time (8.6 per cent) than offering advice about non-prescription medicines (6.6 per cent) or counselling about prescription medicines (3.8 per cent). Non-professional encounters accounted for 4.1 per cent of the work time and stock control activities for 3.4 per cent. Pharmacists spent less than half their time (46.2 per cent) on professional activities.

Overall, pharmacists spent nearly two-fifths of their time on supply-based processes. Clinical services accounted for about a twentieth of their time, ranging from 0.2 to 15 per cent.

€While accepting that practice change will be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, at the current pace it will be many decades before community pharmacists' skills are properly implemented into primary healthcare,€ say the authors.