Abstract
Background
Current evidence supports the benefit of medicine-use review (MUR) for the safe and effective use of medicines. However, little is known about opinions of consumers regarding their preference for undertaking MUR, especially in the developing world, eg, in some Asian countries. We aimed to explore patients’ opinions about potential MUR and other enhanced services provided by community pharmacists.
Patients and methods
A qualitative study using focus groups was conducted at Naresuan University’s community pharmacy, Phitsanulok, Thailand. MUR-naïve patients were recruited from two pharmacies in Phitsanulok. All focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed, and thematically analyzed.
Results
Twenty participants attended four focus groups. The following themes were identified: 1) requirement and need for the service, 2) accessibility and convenience of receiving the service, 3) pharmacist attributes needed in delivering the service, and 4) how to promote the use of MUR successfully. The majority of participants had poor understanding about their medicines and were interested in receiving a MUR service. Regarding accessibility, convenience and close proximity of pharmacies to homes were deemed to be supportive of participants to use the service. However, several potential barriers to uptake were identified: perceived difficulty on the part of recipients in making time to receive the service and the inconvenience of having to provide medicines/records of medicines to pharmacists. The following domains of pharmacists’ characteristics were viewed as supportive determinants: personality (friendliness and confidence in giving information) and attitude (willingness to provide the service and not commercially oriented). The participants suggested that promoting the services using a mix of strategies would increase an awareness of MUR service.
Conclusion
Recognizing the unmet needs of patients for information on their medicines provides a good opportunity for community pharmacists to offer an MUR service to ensure quality use of medicines in the community.
Supplementary materials
Focus-group topic guide and questions
Issue 1: Experiences and opinions on the use of pharmacy services
How do you use the community pharmacy?
Prompts
– How often do you use the community pharmacy?
– Why do you visit the pharmacy?
Issue 2: Drug-related problems
Do you have problems related to medicines that you currently use?
Prompt
– If so, how did you deal with it?
Issue 3: Understanding of the use of medicines
What do you think about your understanding of the use of your medicines?
Prompt
– Where did you get information about your medicines?
Issue 4: Need and perceived benefit of medicine-use review (MUR) service
What will you do if the pharmacist offers the MUR service to you? Why do you think that?
Prompts
– What do you think about the benefit of the MUR service?
– What is the appropriate length of time to undertake the service?
Issue 5: Barriers to and facilitators for using MUR
What factors do you feel encourage you to use the MUR service, and what factors do you feel discourage you from using this service?
Prompts
– What do you think about locations of pharmacies?
– What do you think about the skills and trainings of pharmacists?
– What do you think about the privacy and confidentiality of the pharmacy premises?
– What do you think about accessibility of pharmacies/pharmacists?
Issue 6: How to promote uptake of the MUR service
What do you think should have been done to make people aware of the MUR service more?
Prompts
– What would be an effective advertisement to promote the MUR service to targeted patients?
– What do you think should have been done to make people use the MUR service in community pharmacies more?
Issue 7: Contribution of community pharmacies to improve safe and appropriate use of medicines
How could community pharmacies help to improve the safe and appropriate use of medicines?
Prompt
– Are there any health services that you think should be delivered through pharmacies?
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all patients for their time in participating in the focus groups. This research received financial support from the National Health Security Office (NHSO), region 2, Phitsanulok.
Disclosure
The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.