Pharmacy users’ expectations of pharmacy encounters: a Q-methodological study

Abstract

Background Pharmacy practice is evolving according to general health-care trends such as increased patient involvement and public health initiatives. In addition, pharmacists strive to find new professional roles. ClientsÕ expectations of service encounters at pharmacies is an under-explored topic but crucial to understanding how pharmacy practice can evolve efficiently.

Customer interest in and experience with various types of pharmacy counselling – a qualitative study

“…There were considerable variations in the participants' answers, indicating that caution should be taken when generalizing customers' expectations of and their interest in pharmacy counselling. Customers are individuals and have different interests in counselling for different reasons, thereby supporting the results of Renberg et al . who showed that the customers' normative expectations of pharmacies differed.…”

“…The result might not be as surprising when taking into account Renberg et al . 's finding that many customers perceive the actual product as the core of the pharmacy encounter. However, from the large extent of customers in our study reporting specific drug incidents where valuable help had been obtained indicate also that those customers who appreciate the counselling services of the staff (according to the categorization of Renberg) share this tendency.…”

“…First, customers themselves have shown to differ in their expectations of and wishes for pharmacy visits. Renberg et al . identified seven different ideal customer scenarios for pharmacy encounters.…”

Provision of Personalized Genomic Diagnostic Technologies for Breast and Colorectal Cancer: An Analysis of Patient Needs, Expectations and Priorities

“…We developed and administered an adapted Q-sort instrument [17,18], a methodology that uses factor ana lysis to identify underlying patterns in data, and has been applied in a variety of health settings [19][20][21][22][23]. Briefly, the Q method is a type of research that integrates qualitative and quantitative techniques to reveal social perspectives, which can be identified by looking for patterns within the Q sorts [17,18].…”

Applying a best-worst scaling methodology to prioritise important attributes of counselling from community pharmacy users’ perspective, Saudi Arabia

“…Despite that, previous studies have revealed that counselling provided by community pharmacists is suboptimal . Counselling by community pharmacists is a complex process influenced by many factors such as the pharmacy users’ expectations of their pharmacy visits and perception of the professional role of the community pharmacist, types of questions pharmacist asks, the pharmacy users’ awareness of the need for questioning and willingness to answer questions and the discrepancies between pharmacy staff and users in their perception of illness and medicine . Throughout this paper, we will use the term pharmacy or community pharmacy ‘users’.…”