Patient journey mapping has emerged as a valuable research methodology in healthcare, providing a comprehensive and patient-centric approach to understanding the entire spectrum of a patient’s experience within the healthcare system (1). This area of research can be highly beneficial to improving hospital pharmacy practise by identifying the medication-related problems patients face and mapping their encounters with pharmacists and other healthcare professionals. This project explores a gap in the literature, as patient mapping has not been utilised in hospital pharmacy previously. The main goal of our research is to use patient journey mapping to categorise hospital wards in order of clinical need for pharmacist input. This will be achieved by the patient mapping methodology being conducted in medical surgical and critical care wards of the University Hospital of Waterford (UHW). Medication activities will inform categorisation. The UHW Pharmacy Department patient prioritisation tool will be used for comparing activities. The data collected will be descriptive and visualised through texts, graphs and charts. This is a novel intervention aimed at providing a strategic plan for clinical ward prioritisation for clinical pharmacy services. Ultimately, by allocating resources to the highest areas of need, more complex cases will receive clinical pharmacist input, therefore leading to better patient outcomes.
