Patient Satisfaction with Community Pharmacies in Tehran, Iran; Part I

Community pharmacists, the most accessible member of health chain, have outreached from medicine dispensers to health professionals responsible for safe, effective and rational use of medicines besides patient counseling with drug information while other personnel of a pharmacy help to complete the health care services (1-3). " Most drug related problems are avoidable and community pharmacies are assuming an active role in preventing and solving them " (4). Patient satisfaction is an essential indicator of care quality. Managed care organizations in the United States include patient satisfaction as an item for service quality. The information of patient satisfaction has been a precious tool to assess the patient's interest fields of community pharmacy services. The quality of a department in health care including pharmacy can be assessed using a satisfaction questionnaire (5-7). Several researches have evaluated patient satisfaction with community pharmacy services. There are papers investigated other related aspects in Iran, but no literature exists on satisfaction of pharmacies or pharmacists there, although few studies have taken a view on the geographical distribution of pharmacies in Iran (8, 9). This is an investigation of patients' satisfaction with the quality of health services of pharmacists and pharmacy staff in Tehran, Iran. It focuses on the pharmacists' performance quality illustrating the defects of pharmacies and pharmacists' health care services in aspect of patients' opinion. Ten central city areas of Tehran were considered. Ten community pharmacies were randomly chosen from each area. Twenty questionnaires were separately filled by 20 patients, randomly selected from each pharmacy (Totally 2000 patients or questionnaires). The questionnaire contained 7 items about patient experience with the health services given by pharmacist and pharmacy personnel. Every item was responded by patients as " good " , " moderate " or " poor " (Table 1). Demographic characteristics of the patients showed that the number of women and men were almost equal and almost equally distributed among the different age groups. Considering all patients of the study, the response output was about 85% and Cronbach's alpha coefficient of reliability was calculated as 0.890. Percentages of every answer " Good " , " Moderate " and " Poor " were calculated for every item presented in Table 1, indicating the rate of patients' satisfaction with every item. Items 1 to 4 were the most satisfactory items for patients since they received more percentages of answer " Good " than answer " Moderate " …