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
OBJECTIVE: We conducted a survey to understand the current state of pharmacy services and pharmacists' thoughts in the future of the community pharmacy setting. METHODS: A questionnaire was distributed to 229 pharmacists and gathered from 95 respondents. RESULTS: We asked to pharmacists about what the ideal pharmacy duty should be in the next 10 years at the community pharmacy setting in Korea. For this question, the respondents said drug counselling (19.4%), dispensing (13.8%), longterm care of chronic disease and healthcare education (12.8%), and OTC counselling (11.5%). When asked about how much time they were spending doing certain tasks in the pharmacy, the main tasks were dispensing (23.5%), counselling (17.1%), prescription review (10.1%), and OTC counselling (5.5%). When asked about what the most important duty of a pharmacist was, medication counselling (45.4%) was the most important task that they identified and the reasons for not being able to fulfill this role properly was time shortage (78.9%) followed by the lack of counselling spaces, up-to-date knowledges, and focus on financial gains over patient counselling. CONCLUSION: Korean pharmacists are mainly focusing on dispensing in their daily work. Their basic responsibilities can be easily mechanized over the next few years, but the social expectations of disease-prevention and public health promotion both in current and future can not be replaced by such mechanical measures. Therefore, pharmaceutical services in Korea should be developed in more diverse and professional ways.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The recent change in pharmaceutical education system following the paradigm shift to patient-oriented pharmacy service requires an in-depth discussion to reorganize a future direction and establish a basis for maximizing social values of community pharmacy service. OBJECTIVE: This study was conducted to review the current status of community pharmacy service provision in Korea based on published literatures. METHODS: The electronic databases of National Digital Science Library and Electronic National Assembly Library were used to search the journal articles and dissertation papers. A search term "community pharmacy" was used and the published period was limited to papers published after year 2001, when the legal separation of prescribing and dispensing was implemented. Relevant study reports were also searched manually. Information about pharmacy service provision and study outcomes were retrieved from the selected papers, and classified by predefined individual service scope. RESULTS: A total 33 papers reporting services provided by community pharmacies were selected (journal article 11, dissertation paper 17, and study report 5). Pharmacy services identified in these papers could be classified into prescription dispensing service, pharmaceutical care service, self medication service, other products service, and health promotion service. Twenty papers reported prescription dispensing services, three papers reported pharmaceutical care service, and only two papers reported health promotion service. Current community pharmacy services are highly dependent on prescription drugs while expanded services such as pharmaceutical care and health promotion are peripheral. Most prevalent research topic was medication counseling service (18 papers), reflecting that community pharmacists generally consider it to be the most important and fundamental service. Overall, current pharmacy services are very limited and focus on prescription dispensing service. CONCLUSION: At this point of time requiring expansion and quality improvement of community pharmacy services, we suggest further lively discussion to strengthen pharmacist's functional identity and set conditions for providing socially expected services.
Subject(s)
Humans , Community Pharmacy Services , Counseling , Education, Pharmacy , Health Promotion , Korea , Pharmaceutical Services , Pharmacies , Pharmacists , Prescription Drugs , Prescriptions , Quality Improvement , Self Medication , Social ValuesABSTRACT
O acesso a medicamentos no Brasil ainda é um grande desafio para o sistema de saúde tanto na área pública quanto no setor privado. A legislação que dispõe sobre a regulamentação dos planos privados de saúde determina a obrigação do fornecimento de medicamentos somente aos pacientes que encontrarem-se em situações de internação hospitalar. Não obriga, portanto, a cobertura do fornecimento de medicamentos aos pacientes fora do ambiente hospitalar. O presente trabalho estudou solicitações de medicamentos excepcionais feitas por usuários de planos privados de saúde junto à Secretaria Estadual de Saúde de Minas Gerais no primeiro semestre de 2008. O banco de dados dos solicitantes de medicamentos existente na Secretaria de Estado de Saúde foi liberado para este estudo e enviado para a Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar, com o objetivo de verificar se os solicitantes tinham ou não cadastro de usuários de planos privados de saúde. Foi obtida uma base de dados única constando os solicitantes de medicamentos excepcionais, usuários de planos privados de saúde no Estado de Minas Gerais naquele período. Foi realizado um estudo observacional e transversal, analisadas as seguintes variáveis: sexo dos usuários, origem das solicitações tendo como referência as Gerências Regionais de Saúde, os diagnósticos mencionados e os medicamentos deferidos e custos. Foram analisadas 6.733 solicitações feitas por 6076 usuários. Verificou-se que da amostra estudada, 2058 solicitações de medicamentos excepcionais, foram feitas por usuários de planos privados de saúde com predominância do sexo feminino. A região metropolitana de Belo Horizonte apresentou a maior proporção de solicitações de medicamentos. Para os usuários de planos, o diagnóstico de doenças do aparelho geniturinário destacou-se como o mais freqüente entre as patologias citadas, seguido por doenças do sistema nervoso. No geral, A classe farmacológica de medicamentos mais presentes foi a dos...
Access to medicines in Brazil is still a major challenge for the health system both inpublic and private sector. The legislation provides for the regulation of private health plans determines the obligation of providing drugs only to patients who find themselves in situations of hospitalization. Not entail the coverage of the delivery of medicines to patients outside the hospital. This work studied medicine exceptional requests made by users of private health plans with the State Health Secretariat of Minas Gerais in the first half of 2008. The database of applicants for existing medicines in the State Department of Health for this study was released and sent to the National Health Insurance, in order to check whether applicants were or not registration of users of private health plans. We obtained a single database consisting of medicines exceptional applicants, users of private health plans in the State of Minas Gerais in that period. We conducted an observational study and cross-analyzed: sex of users, origin of the requests by reference to the Regional Health Managers, diagnoses and medications mentioned granted and costs. We analyzed 6,733 requests made by 6076 users. It was found that the study sample, 2,058 requests for exceptional drugs were made by users o fprivate health insurance with a predominance of females. The metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte had the highest proportion of requests for medication. For users of plans, the diagnosis of diseases of the genitourinary system stood out as the most frequent among the pathologies mentioned, followed by diseases of the nervous system. Overall, the pharmacological class of drugs was the most present of immunosuppressiveagents (18.5%) and anti-acne preparations (13.8%). It was found that spending on thesupply of drugs to users of private health plans representing 37% of drug expenses in the period made exceptional and that the cost was higher compared to that provided...