Physician and pharmacy student expectations of pharmacy practice

This study was initiated to examine the attitudes of some of the future health care providers, family practice residents, toward various ambulatory pharmacy services. Pharmacy students were then asked to predict what the resident attitudes would be and the results were compared. This project addressed the following questions: (i) What are the expectations of family practice residents of what today's pharmacists should be doing? and (ii) How accurately can pharmacy students judge what the responses of the residents will be? The survey results indicated that the family practice residents' perceptions of certain pharmacist behaviors rated significantly higher than how the pharmacy students thought they would respond. Such behaviors included: (i) maintain and review patient profiles; (ii) counsel patients; (iii) take medication/allergy histories; (iv) provide therapeutic information to physicians; and (v) stock a wide variety of generic drugs. Most of these behaviors reflect direct involvement of the pharmacist in disseminating information to the patient and/or physician. Other expanded roles of the pharmacist such as triage, refill determination, reimbursement for consultation services, and chronic care management were given low priority.