Physicians’ knowledge and attitudes toward scheduling

Abstract

Objective: To determine physicians’ knowledge and attitudes of medico-legal issues regarding drug scheduling.

Methods: The cross sectional survey was designed to assess attitudes and mailed to 400 randomly selected physicians.

Results: A total of 155 (43.8%) of the 354 delivered surveys were returned. Physicians across all groups provided consistent responses suggesting a negative attitude about scheduling, a lack of understanding of scheduling issues and a harmful impact of scheduling on their practice. Physicians who saw 20 or more patients differed significantly from the other groups in 50% (4 of the 8) questions suggesting enhanced dissatisfaction.

Keywords::

• Scheduling
• survey
• attitudes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Yuanyuan (Marcia) Wang for her thoughtful reviews and suggestions regarding the statistical analysis of the data.

Declaration of interest: Jonathon M. Parker is a Senior Director of Regulatory Affairs at Pfizer, Inc.

Notes

¹ DEA lists less than 10 active ingredients or combinations as Schedule V, not all of which are prescription products www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/schedules/listby_sched/sched5.htm. Accessed 5 November 2008.

² As only seven physicians see more than 40 patients every day, the variables were regrouped as two categories (<20 or >20).