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Patient evaluations of pharmacist performance with variations in attire and communication levels
John P Bentley1, Lindsey J Stroup, Noel E Wilkin
1Pharmacy Administration, School of Pharmacy, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677, USA. phjpb@olemiss.edu
Objective:
To determine whether the attire of a pharmacist has any effect on how he is evaluated when a patient also considers the pharmacist's performance and to assess whether attire and performance interact to influence patients' evaluations.
Design:
Randomized, cross-sectional, three-factor design.
Setting:
Community pharmacy settings were portrayed.
Participants:
179 university staff members.
Interventions:
Videos of pharmacist-patient interactions were encoded and placed on a Web site to be viewed by participants.
Main Outcome Measures:
Service encounter satisfaction, perceptions of overall service quality, trust in the service provider, and behavioral intentions based on two levels of pharmacist communication performance (high or adequate), three levels of dress style (casual, business casual, formal), and two levels of white coat (wearing or not).
Results:
Of the three independent variables, only communication performance was found to significantly influence the dependent variables. High communication performance resulted in higher satisfaction scores, higher perceptions of quality, higher levels of trust, and behavioral intention scores that reflected a greater willingness to use and recommend the pharmacist.
Conclusion:
Style of dress or whether the pharmacist was wearing a white coat did not significantly influence participants' evaluations of the pharmacist in this study. Rather, the level of the pharmacist's communication performance was the most important cue used by participants in their ratings of service encounter satisfaction, perceptions of overall service quality, and trust in the service provider.
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