Congratulations Jason Perepelkin

Congratulations to Associate Professor, Jason Perepelkin BA, BComm, MSc, PhD

Receiving an Innovation Fund Grant of $40,000 for the project, Unlocking Pharmacists Clinical Capacity: A Time and Motion Study to address Canada’s primary care crisis

The Team
Principal investigator – Jason Perepelkin
Co-investigators – Paul Grootendorst, Danielle Paes, Christopher Juozaitis, Jim Danahy, Jaclyn Katelnikoff, Jeff Mehltretter, and Yvon Picard

Project Summary
Over 6.5 million Canadians lack a primary care home; the equivalent of 22,283 family physicians (44 million clinician hours) are needed to address this gap.

Meanwhile, unpublished private Time and Motion studies done by members of our team report that the current traditional pharmacy workflow, conceived before the era of expanded scope, restricts community pharmacists to spend only 4 minutes an hour or 7% of an average workday on tasks that require their licence.

This baseline study’s aim is to document the gross underuse of pharmacists’ clinical capacity and related inefficiencies, and to highlight the need for pharmacy owners and operators to modernize.

The goal is to catalyze community pharmacy’s immediate transition to proven workflows that multiply the impact of the community pharmacist workforce by 15, unlocking 60 million clinician hours to collaborate with other providers and deliver evidence-based primary care on a massive scale without leaving the pharmacy.

Methods
The Time and Motion portion of the study involves direct observation of pharmacists by pharmacy student observers to measure the tasks performed and the time spent on each; 125 pharmacists will be observed during an 8-hour shift in Saskatchewan and Ontario. As an addition to the project, but not a formal part of the CFP Innovation Grant received, is to include pharmacies in Quebec.

A questionnaire will be given to the pharmacist after T/M observations are completed, to capture their perceptions of time spent on clinical tasks and what additional clinical work they would do if they had more time. While not developed yet, the questionnaire will ask questions such as what do pharmacists ‘perceive’ to be the amount of time (min/hr) they spend on tasks requiring their pharmacist’s licence, and if these pharmacists had more time for patient-facing clinical care, what key tasks would they choose to spend it on?

An ethics application is being prepared and will be submitted for ethics approval at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Toronto with submission in late summer. Planning the logistics of the study have already commenced, with data collection ideally beginning in the latter quarter of 2025.

Innovation Fund Webpage – https://cfpnet.ca/grants-awards/innovation-fund/