Using Clinical Pharmacy Support Technicians to Optimize Pharmaceutical Care in the Intensive Care Unit

1who described the role of the data analyst technician. According to those authors, the activities of data analyst technicians in the ICU focus on retrieving data for individual patients. The information collected may include values for hemodynamic and respiratory parameters, demographic characteristics, fluid and nutritional status, and use of vasopres sors. This support activity is valuable to the delivery of pharmaceutical care in the ICU because it allows pharmacists to focus more on cognitive-based activities, which increases their overall work efficiency. However, we felt that pharmacy technicians were capable of performing more value-added activities than had previously been reported and that they could play a larger role in the ICU. We hypothesized that incorporating a clinical pharmacy support technician (CPST) program in the delivery of direct patient care in the adult tertiary-level ICU would further increase pharmacists’ work efficiency. We defined work efficiency in terms of the number of patients that the pharmacist could comprehensively assess per day and the time spent on cognitive-based activities. This article describes the CPST program at the Royal Columbian Hospital, the activities performed by the technician in the ICU, the benefits of the program, and considerations for implementing similar programs elsewhere.