Satisfaction towards the services provided by the community pharmacist in north-west India: A qualitative exploratory study

Abstract

Abstract Introduction Patient satisfaction is an indicator in identifying and assessing the patient health-related needs, it is an important factor in determining the health care facilitates being delivered to the patients. The Community Pharmacist-led quality of services can be accessed through patient-reported outcomes (PROs). A cross-sectional survey was conducted to assess the level of client/patient satisfaction towards the services provided by the Community Pharmacist and factors affecting it. Methods A descriptive questionnaire-based cross-sectional study was conducted for a period of 3 months targeting general community adults who visit community pharmacy settings. Well-trained student pharmacists collected data from the subjects through an interview and the statistical analysis was done using SPSS v 14. Results A total of 314 participants were included in the study with a mean age of 24.39 years and standard deviation of 9.27 years. A higher number of participants were poorly satisfied (39.5%) with the quality of patient counseling; only fewer (2.2%) participants marked the quality of patient counseling delivered by the pharmacist as excellent. Level of satisfaction was higher for the male participants as compared to female participants, with an adjusted odds ratio of 2.541\u202fat 95% CI 1.221–5.286 with a significant p-value of 0.017. Conclusion This paper provides an overview of the quality of services provided by Community Pharmacist in India. There is an immense need to organize the continuing education programs for the Community Pharmacist by employing social and administrative pharmacy tools to improve the services.