Public views of community pharmacists in Taiwan

A large-scale national survey was conducted to assess the general public's attitudes about, need for and satisfaction with community pharmacists and the services they provide in Taiwan.

Computer-assisted telephone interviews were conducted by a contract agency using random-digit dialing procedures to achieve a nationally representative sample of adult residents. An 18-item interview survey questionnaire was developed based on previous similar surveys and a pretest-type process was employed by monitoring early responses of interviews to ensure understanding by respondents.

A total of 9066 phone exchanges were dialed resulting in 2658 conversations with potential respondents and 1089 completed interviews. Overall, 45.6% of respondents agreed that community pharmacists always treat them sincerely and 41.2% agreed that community pharmacists have the ability to answer their questions. Fewer respondents agreed that community pharmacists were the first professional they consulted for answers about medication use (31.7%) and that they generally trusted the pharmacist (33.2%). Older respondents had more favourable perceptions and respondents with more education had less favourable perceptions. About half of the respondents reported a need for medication use instructions, help in developing personal medication records and help in filling chronic-disease prescriptions. A majority of respondents were satisfied with specific pharmacist services; however, only 8.5-22.5% of respondents previously had experienced these services. Fewer respondents reported general satisfaction with community pharmacist services.

Although generally consumers had less-than-positive perceptions about community pharmacists, their responses revealed some level of trust of pharmacists, awareness of the services that pharmacists may be able to provide and satisfaction with services provided by pharmacists.