Investigation of Patients’ Demand for Community Pharmacies:

Abstract

We performed an investigation on the patients' demand for community pharmacy based on the analysis of questionnaire responses on community pharmacy services from the patients at 32 pharmacies in Tokyo and Osaka. In the previous study, we developed seven evaluation indices for pharmacy services, and showed that the functions most sought by patients inthèìdeal pharmacies'' werè`Attitude of pharmacy/pharmacist'', ``Convenient hours'' and``and``Informa-tion management''. The objective of this study is to determine the relationship between these pharmacy functions and patient satisfaction by analyzing responses from the same questionnaire survey. Overall satisfaction score with thè`pharmacythè`pharmacy used today'' was employed as the dependent variable, while the six factors derived from the 26 item evaluation scale in the questionnaire by factor analysis were used as the independent variables. As a result of analysis, it was found that four variables had a signiˆcant positive correlation with patient satisfaction, one had a signiˆcant inverse correlation , and one showed no signiˆcant correlation (p＜0.05). These results suggest that: attitude of the pharmacists such as general attitude and specialized activities of pharmacy/pharmacist such as providing information and explanations , and convenience of hours are not only judged to be important by patients, but also in‰uence their satisfaction; comfortable facilities and availability of OTC drugs, while rated relatively low by patients in terms of importance, do in-‰uence their satisfaction; and convenience of location does not in‰uence patient satisfaction. It was also indicated that insu‹cient inventories of prescribed medications have an impact upon patient satisfaction. This investigation oŠers evidence to provide patient based pharmacy services.