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Do pharmacy practice standards effectively describe behaviour? Reviewing practice standards using a behavioural specificity framework

Mill, D; Page, A; Johnson, J; Lee, K; Salter, SM; Seubert, L; Clifford, R; (2022) Do pharmacy practice standards effectively describe behaviour? Reviewing practice standards using a behavioural specificity framework. BMC Health Services Research , 22 , Article 71. 10.1186/s12913-021-07358-4. Green open access

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Abstract

BACKGROUND: Guidelines and practice standards exist to communicate the conduct and behaviour expected of health care professionals and ensure consistent quality practice. It is important that they describe behaviours explicitly so they can be interpreted, enacted and measured with ease. The AACTT framework specifies behaviour in terms of the: Action to be performed, Actor who performs the action, Context where the action occurs, Target who the action is performed with/for and Time when the action is performed (AACTT). It provides the most up to date framework for specifying behaviours and is particularly relevant to complex behavioural problems that involve sequences of behaviours performed by different people. Behavioural specificity within pharmacy practice standards has not been explored. AIM: To determine if behaviours described in the Professional Practice Standards for Australian Pharmacists specify Action, Actor, Context, Target and Time. METHODS: Two researchers independently reviewed the scope and structure of the practice standards and one extracted action statements (behaviours) verbatim. Through an iterative process, the researchers modified and developed the existing AACTT definitions to operationalise them for application to review of the action statements in the practice standards. The operational definitions, decision criteria and curated examples were combined in a codebook. The definitions were consistently applied through a directed content analysis approach to evaluate all extracted action statements by one researcher. For consistency 20% was independently checked for agreement by a second researcher. RESULTS: A novel codebook to apply AACTT criteria to evaluate practice standards was developed. Application of this codebook identified 768 independent behaviours. Of these, 300 (39%) described at least one discrete observable action, none specified an actor, 25 (3%) specified context, 131 (17%) specified target and 88 (11%) specified time. CONCLUSION(S): The behaviours detailed in practice standards for Australian pharmacists do not consistently specify behaviours in terms of Action, Actor, Context, Target and Time. Developers in the pharmacy profession, and beyond, should consider the behavioural specificity of their documents to improve interpretability, usability and adherence to the behaviours detailed. This also has implications for the development and evaluation of interventions to change such behaviours and improve quality of care.

Type: Article
Title: Do pharmacy practice standards effectively describe behaviour? Reviewing practice standards using a behavioural specificity framework
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1186/s12913-021-07358-4
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-07358-4
Language: English
Additional information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
Keywords: Behavioural specification, Pharmacist, Practice standards, Professional behaviour
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Clinical, Edu and Hlth Psychology
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10142066
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