The Voice of Canada’s Front-line Pharmacists: METHODS
A survey for non-managers was developed based on some of the questions in the survey of pharmacy leaders. The survey was initially drafted by a pharmacy student during her structured practical experience rotation at the CSHP national office in Ottawa. The survey (described in detail below) was reviewed, edited, and tested by members of the CSHP Hospital Pharmacy Management Task Force, which is composed mostly of hospital pharmacy managers with an interest in succession planning. The survey was developed in an online format to simplify the response mechanism. The survey tool used was Survey Monkey. Responses were restricted to one reply per e-mail address to prevent multiple entries from the same person. Once a reply was received, the e-mail address was stripped from the data, and no other personal identifiers were collected, to ensure anonymity of responses.
An announcement about the survey was sent by e-mail to all CSHP members by the Society’s national office on February 6, 2008. The original closing date was February 29, 2008, and an e-mail reminder was sent to all CSHP members 2 weeks before that date. The closing date was extended to March 21, 2008, to capture a larger sample size. The extension was communicated to all CSHP members on March 10, 2008, by means of a reminder e-mail.
The final survey consisted of 19 questions: 15 multiple- choice questions, 2 that required ranking of options, 1 that asked for details related to a previous question, and 1 open-ended question, to elicit any additional information. Most of the questions allowed the respondent to provide additional comments or expand on an option listed as “Other”.
To capture only those CSHP members in non-management positions, the first question was, “What position do you currently hold?” If the answer was “management” (examples of which included manager, director, coordinator, and supervisor), the respondent was directed to the survey exit screen, where he or she was informed that the survey was seeking responses from non-management pharmacists only. All others were directed to the remainder of the survey. viagra soft
The demographic questions elicited information such as type of position currently held, location of employment in Canada (by region), gender, full- or part-time status, years of practice experience, single-site or multisite responsibilities, and education and training background.
Descriptive data were tabulated and/or graphed as appropriate. Data for questions with the instruction “Select all that apply” were tabulated and sorted according to the number of individuals selecting each potential response. Ranked data were tabulated and sorted according to the number of respondents selecting each potential response in their top 5. Comments were gathered and reviewed to identify common themes. No statistical analyses were performed. Because the fields within each survey were disconnected, correlations between different data elements could not be determined.