ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Although the importance of pharmaceutical care service has been growing to meet the needs of customers with the improvement of clinical and humanistic outcomes, there was not a systematic strategy to promote research in Korea. The aim of this study was to suggest the core agendas for pharmaceutical care services research and development (R&D) considering priorities. METHODS: Based on desk researches, we developed R&D agendas for the needs of improving pharmaceutical care services in the area of institution, community, and public health. To determine the priority of agendas in developing pharmaceutical care service, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) analysis was performed by the 14 experts. Criteria and subcriteria were assessed for significance by pairwise comparisons. Then, agendas were evaluated for importance according to each subcriteria, and rank ordered considering the weight calculated by multiplying the importance scores of the criteria and the subcriteria. RESULTS: We derived 25 agendas including 13 for institutional pharmaceutical care service, 8 for community pharmaceutical care service, and 4 for public-health related pharmaceutical care service. AHP model was constructed based on 4 criteria and 8 subcriteria by a hierarchical structure. From the AHP survey, the ‘Development of pharmaceutical care service for metabolic and chronic disease’ agenda accounted for the highest priority. CONCLUSION: We have developed the R&D agendas of the pharmaceutical care service which should be promoted. The results should be utilized by the government to nationally support the development of the standards and relevant regulations related to pharmaceutical care services in Korea.
Subject(s)
Korea , Pharmaceutical Services , Public Health , Social Control, FormalABSTRACT
Drug Information Centers are responsible for providing updated, relevant drug information on the efficacy, safety and quality of drugs as well as disease status to health-care practitioners and finally to patients. This study was designed to revise the drug information service based on the evaluation to meet the social requirement that is created by the recent "Drug Prescription and Dispensing Law" A retrospective analysis was conducted from April 1997 untill September 2000. To evaluate the trend of service, the evaluated period was divided in 7 6-months intervals. The feedback system was used to measure the satisfaction score as an outcome. Out of 618 total enquiries, 192 (31.0%) was received in the last 6-month period. The method of receiving and providing drug information by Drug Information Research Institute (DIRI) gradually changed from telephone calls to e-mailing system (2.2% vs. 67.2% in question, 2.2% vs. 70.3% in answer). Drug information questions concerning the pharmacology (18.8%), adverse drug reaction (10.5%), availability (10.3%) and drug interaction (5.2%) were asked most frequently. The median time to respond the inquired questions was 24 hours (range: 1 hr-8 days). The reference used most frequently to answer was the tertiary literature (42.0%) followed by the second literature (27%) and primary literature (7%). The evaluable 29 feedbacks showed that DI services provided by DIRI were satisfactory in accuracy and time. On the basis of the analysis and evaluation of this project, DIRI have developed the more specified Q and A Sheet Form, systemic database and on-line Q and A corner accessible through the homepage.