| BACKGROUND: During the last decade the profession of pharmacy has undergone some fundamental changes, including increased workload, development of new technologies and introduction of patient-oriented pharmaceutical care. This type of care was shown to improve drug use (access, cost and patient outcomes) and some of the provincial governments have introduced legislation granting pharmacists limited prescribing rights to provide pharmaceutical care within their scope of competency. However, there has been slow progress on issues of licensing, work environment and reimbursement for pharmacists. The objective of this analysis was to examine the regulatory issues of providing pharmaceutical care as it pertains to consumers and pharmacists, specifically which of the proposed services to provide (refill prescriptions, emergency, over-the-counter (OTC) and monitoring of complex prescriptions), who is ready to provide/accept these services, what are the facilitators and barriers to pharmaceutical care, and the effect of price on the provision of these services.;RESULTS: Total participants in the survey included 452 consumers (MB) and 601 pharmacists (BC, AB, MB, ON, PEI and NF). 40% of both pharmacists and consumers would be ready to provide/receive services in 1 month (preparation stage). Approximately 80% of pharmacists would provide refills, OTC and emergency prescribing services and only 50% would provide complex medication management. For the consumers, 77% would use refills, 30% would use OTC and Emergency services and only 12% would use complex medication management. On the importance scale both pharmacists and consumers rated the statement "pharmacist acquires additional knowledge, education and skill" as the most important. Pharmacists were most confident in their ability to refer and the least confident they will be able to find time to provide these services. Consumers were most confident in the ability of pharmacists to interact with other health care professionals and least confident in the pharmacist ability to perform an assessment. The conjoint analysis results indicated that both pharmacists and consumers assigned the highest utility to the pharmacy that provided refills at the lower price level (;METHODS: The study used the Transtheoretical Model of Change (Prochaska and Diclemente) to estimate the number of pharmacists and consumers willing to provide/use these services and help to identify the facilitators and the barriers that may influence pharmacy adoption of these services. Contingent Valuation Methods (hypothetical scenarios) were used to do a conjoint analysis of the services and predict the provision/use of these services by pharmacists/consumers when price was assigned to the service. Consumer Demand Theory of Microeconomics was used to determine any potential benefits of these services to the public. The study was a random web-based survey of pharmacists and consumers. |
