Nurses' evaluation of pharmacists' services--a hospital survey

One of the tools to evaluate quality of service is to measure satisfaction from services provided. This survey evaluates the quality of pharmacy services based on the satisfaction of nurses who require pharmacy services on the wards. When a nurse evaluates pharmacist services, an appropriate concept of their evaluation should be selected. Three different types of evaluation have been identified that could be applied to these services: performance evaluation (how convenient, reliable, and accessible is a service), disconfirmation of expectations (service experience that involves comparison between the service experience and expectation), and self- efficacy evaluation (extent to which a pharmacist service leads to nurse self-efficacy).

To measure nurses' evaluations of pharmacists' services in a general hospital in Israel, using those three types of evaluations.

Nurses were asked to evaluate, by a questionnaire the service in terms of performance, disconfirmation of expectations by rating statements for each subject on a 5-point scale, where 5 was the highest rating. Self-efficacy was evaluated by one choice positive or negative answer.

A total of 252 (95.1) questionnaires were filled out and returned for evaluation. Nurses rated pharmacists' performance as 4.2 (+/-0.5) (P=0.01). Disconfirmation of expectations was rated as 3.6 (+/-0.8) and self-evaluation as 3.7 (+/-0.2). Linear regression models were estimated for general satisfaction of pharmacists' services and performance was significant when correlated with the period of nurses' professional service.

Analysis of the three tools of evaluation for pharmacy services by nurses showed that the performance evaluation was most favored, followed by disconfirmation of expectations and self-efficacy evaluation. Conceptualization of satisfaction, with tools as performance evaluation and disconfirmation of expectations is useful for those services that nurses have experience with and can relate to. For services with ambiguous or unfamiliar nature (e.g., professional self-evaluation due to pharmacist services), most nurses do not have the expertise to assess pharmacist performance. This survey provides for a better conceptual understanding of how nurses evaluate pharmacist services and how these evaluations should be measured.