The comfort level of pharmacists who counsel contraceptive patients

Abstract

SUMMARY The purpose of this study was to examine a pharmacist's comfort level when she/he counsels patients receiving different types of contraceptive. The pharmacist's counselling comfort is important because it could determine the initiation of patient contact and the quality of the contraception counselling. There has been little research done related to the pharmacist's contraception counselling behaviour, and in this paper several variables judged to be important in the counselling process were tested. The subjects used for this study were 128 pharmacists licensed to practice in the state of Washington, and the data were collected using a mailed survey and later analysed using Pearson correlation coefficients and regression analysis. Statistically significant differences in counselling comfort were found related to age, professional responsibility, religiosity and contraceptive knowledge. Additionally, it was found that one's sense of professional responsibility was related to religiosity, sex guilt, age and contraceptive knowledge. It is suggested that as pharmacists begin to move more into the role of clinical counsellor, they need to become more aware of their own attitudes and professional feelings about such topics.

HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH METHODS IN PHARMACY: Survey research: (1) Design, samples and response

“…A list provided by the Washington State Board included the names and addresses of over 2,000 pharmacists but whether this was all pharmacists was unclear. 106 Lists maintained by other organisations and used as sampling frames may represent sub-populations of pharmacists, eg, National Pharmaceutical Association in Britain,l3J7 pharmacies of a large multiple chain in the UK,107 and those employed by Owen-Healthcare in the US. 108 The advantages of accessible sampling frames and possibly increased response rates following internal distribution, must be offset by the restricted generalisability.…”