New Zealand health disparities-pharmacists' knowledge gaps and training needs

Reducing health disparities is a priority for the New Zealand (NZ) Government and the health care sector and, although not mandatory until 2012, Competence Standard 1 for NZ pharmacists has been revised to reflect this.

The main aim was to understand the information needs of pharmacists in the context of reducing health inequalities in NZ through undertaking a baseline study of pharmacists' knowledge of health status disparities, identifying relevant resources most commonly read by pharmacists, soliciting ideas on how the profession can contribute to reducing health disparities and gauging pharmacists' willingness to undergo further training.

An anonymous, semi-structured questionnaire was posted out to 500 randomly selected practising pharmacists registered in NZ.

A 27% response rate was achieved. In general, responding pharmacists had good health disparity knowledge about asthma and the prevalence of cardiovascular disease, but were less knowledgeable about differences in life expectancies and some mortality rates. Responding pharmacists made a variety of achievable suggestions where pharmacists can contribute to decreasing health disparities. Eighty percent of respondents indicated they were interested in learning more about cultural competence and health disparities in their community.

Our results indicate a need for pharmacists to up-skill in the area of health disparities and cultural competence and for more effective promotion of the resources available to pharmacists to improve their knowledge in this area. The pharmacists in this study appear willing to undertake such study; however, due to the low response rate generalisations to all pharmacists practising in New Zealand cannot be made.