POINT COUNTERPOINT Should Key Performance Indicators Be a Component of Performance Assessment for Individual Clinical Pharmacists? THE “PRO ” SIDE

Pharmacists represent a scarce human resource in Canadian hospitals, with about 2900 full-time pharmacists providing care for 95 000 acute care bed-days in 2010.1,2 It is vital to ensure that clinical pharmacists are performing the highest-value activities for the highest-priority patients. Clinical pharmacy leadership and front-line pharmacists require tools to facilitate objective assessment of employee performance, to define benchmarks for performance, and to facilitate the improvement of employee performance. If we cannot measure something, then we cannot control it. In turn, if we lack the ability to control something, then we cannot improve it. In brief, then, improvement efforts rely on measurement. This concept applies to the performance of both organizations and employees. Clinical pharmacists need objective feedback on their performance to understand what i