Determinants of pharmacists' confidence to participate in antimicrobial stewardship: A confirmatory factor analysis

Abstract

AimPharmacists are essential members of hospital antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) teams. A lack of self‐perceived confidence can limit pharmacists' involvement and contributions. Pharmacists working in AMS have reported a lack of confidence. There is currently a lack of validated measures to assess pharmacists' self‐perceived confidence when working in AMS and contributors to this confidence. This study aimed to identify variables contributing to pharmacist self‐perceived confidence and validate an AMS hospital pharmacist survey tool using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).MethodsResponses from a survey of Australian and French hospital pharmacists were used to undertake CFA and path analysis on factors related to pharmacists' self‐perceived confidence. It was hypothesized that pharmacists' self‐perceived confidence would be impacted by time working in AMS, perceived importance of AMS programmes, perceived barriers to participating in AMS and current participation.ResultsCFA demonstrated a good model fit between the factors. Items included in the model loaded well to their respective factors with acceptable reliability. Path analysis demonstrated that time working in AMS had a significant impact on pharmacists' self‐perceived confidence, while perceived barriers had a negatively significant relationship. Pharmacy participation in AMS and perceived importance of AMS programmes had a non‐significant impact.ConclusionFindings demonstrated that the survey tool showed good validity and identified factors that can impact pharmacists' self‐perceived confidence when working in hospital AMS programmes. Having a validated survey tool can identify factors that can reduce pharmacists' self‐perceived confidence. Strategies can then be developed to address these factors and subsequently improve pharmacists' self‐perceived confidence.