Workforce planning has been a huge concern especially in healthcare industry settings where the large and inefficient workforce will result in significant costs while a shortage of professionals would increase the workforce efforts and may have consequential impact on service quality. The simpler and rational approach for planning workforce based on workload is the workload indicators of staffing need (WISN) approach developed by World Health Organization. The purpose of this study was to find the number of pharmacists needed using the WISN approach and develop the framework for identifying number of pharmacists needed under the context of a private hospital in Myanmar. The study applied cross-sectional research design conducted through interviews, direct observation of time it took to dispense number of medication items per prescriptions and reviewing hospital documents. There were 3 pharmacists of the case study hospital were selected to determine workload components such as the health service activities, support activities and individual additional activities. 56 observations were done using time study with standard operating procedures of 8 steps for exploring standard unit time. The results showed that total workload standards of 56481.5 items dispensed prescriptions per year. The final results of current 25-bedded hospital pharmacy needed 1.466 pharmacists with a WISN ratio of 0.672. The results of this study showed that the case study hospital pharmacy was well understaffed with high workloads to be performed, requiring efficient human resource policies to handle the workforce management if the hospital has a plan to extend 50-bedded with critical care services.

Keywords

Workforce Planning, Pharmacist, WISN, Workload Components, Unit Time