Professional services in community pharmacy: what does the patient think?

Introduction: Pharmacist must redirect the activity of the community pharmacy towards pharmaceutical professional services (PPS) intended to improve the health of the patients. The objectives of this work were investigate the user characteristics and to know its opinion about nine PPS. 

Materials and methods: An observational study was carried out in two community pharmacies in Valladolid (December, 1 2013 – February, 20 2014). “On-line” questionnaires were provided by the pharmacist to users older than 14 years. The characteristics of the user, his interest in the possible use of nine PPS (score 0-10) and on the remuneration of the same ones were collected. The statistical analysis was carried out with the SPSS 19.0 program. 

Results: In this study 154 persons (average age of 45.7±16.4 years) filled up the questionnaire. The better valued PPS were the Personalized System of Dosage (PSD), the Monitoring of the Ambulatory Blood Pressure (MABP), Medicine Use Review (MUR), Screening of Prevalent Diseases (SPD) and the Pharmacotherapy Follow-up (PTF). The patient would be willing to pay for the services: MABP, control of blood parameters, nutritional support and smoking cessation. Community pharmacy should be self-financing in the provision of education and health promotion service. Social security primarily would participate in the remuneration of the SPD, PTF and RUM. 

Discussion: The user opinion was very positive and would be willing to pay for most of them.