Management, leadership, teaching and interprofessional collaboration
This domain tests whether you can run a pharmacy service and develop the people in it: structure, change, teaching design and team behaviour, applied to hospital realities.
Management fundamentals
Clarify mission, structure, span of control and skill mix; budget and staffing models follow activity, not history. Use indicators that reflect quality as well as cost (intervention acceptance rate, reconciliation completeness, turnaround time, stock-out rate, error rate) in a balanced scorecard rather than a single metric. Know your governance interfaces: hospital board, medical directorate, nursing, quality unit, the Arzneimittelkommission and cantonal authorities.
Change and projects
PDCA cycles, Lean/value-stream mapping, 5S and standard work for routine processes. For larger change, structured models (Lewin's unfreeze–change–refreeze, Kotter's sequence) explain why a technically perfect plan fails without urgency and a guiding coalition. Manage projects with a charter, stakeholder analysis, RACI matrix, milestones and a risk register; define the success measure before implementation.
Leadership and team behaviour
Match style to the situation (directing, coaching, supporting, delegating). Give feedback on observed behaviour with impact (situation–behaviour–impact), in private, and follow up. Build psychological safety and a just culture so errors surface; handle conflict with a conscious strategy (competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating) rather than by default. Recognise burnout drivers - workload, control, fairness, values - and address them structurally.
Teaching and interprofessional collaboration
Define learning objectives and align them with activity and assessment (Miller pyramid: knows → knows how → shows → does). Use clinical teaching micro-models (One-Minute Preceptor, SNAPPS) on the ward; evaluate every teaching session. Interprofessional collaboration depends on role clarity, shared goals and structured communication (SBAR), and can be taught with simulation.
Worked example
Problem: missed antibiotic doses on a surgical ward. Reasoning: charter and baseline measurement (missed-dose rate over two weeks); stakeholder analysis (nursing, physicians, IT, logistics); value-stream mapping identifies cabinet stock-outs and undelivered prescriptions as causes; PDCA pilot with automated cabinet par levels and barcode check; measure pre/post, then standardise. Training alone would not have changed a supply problem.
Traps
- Presenting a project without baseline data or a defined success measure.
- Treating leadership as personality rather than a situational choice.
- Designing teaching without objectives or evaluation.
- Fixing people when the process is the cause.