Optimizing Pharmacist Team-Integration for ICU Patient Management (OPTIM): Recruitment and Retention Strategies to Mobilize a Professional Community

Abstract

It is challenging to generate data sufficient to assess the complex relationships between pharmacist workload and patient outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to describe innovative methods of recruitment and retention in engaging health professionals as study participants in a multicenter effort to collect workload data for a large investigation of pharmacist-to-patient ratios and patient-centered outcomes in the intensive care unit (ICU). In the Optimizing Pharmacist-Team Integration for ICU patient Management (OPTIM) study, critical care pharmacists (CCPs) were recruited to prospectively collect data on workload for 100 days before a retrospective data analysis period. This design was essential for robust, externally generalizable analysis of workload relationships to patient-centered outcomes. Recruitment and retention strategies to support this study design are illustrated. Recruitment strategies used professional association listservs, engagement of pharmacy residency programs, and information sessions. Retention strategies included newsletters, office hours, enrichment sessions, OPTIM-related marketing, in-person networking, and authorship potential. This resulted in study completion by 64 sites with 31 832 adult patients, 207 CCPs, 53 trainees, and 22 additional investigators supporting data collection with a missingness rate of less than 2%. Recruitment and retention strategies to promote teamwork without large-scale funding were successful in generating the largest database of CCP workloads and patient-level data.

Keywords: critical care; data collection; intensive care units; multicenter studies; personnel selection; pharmacists; workload.