Community pharmacies automation: any impact on counselling duration and job satisfaction?

One key indicator of the quality of health practitioners-patient interaction is the encounters' duration. Automation have been presented as beneficial to pharmacy staff work with patients and thus with a potential impact on pharmacists' and technicians' job satisfaction.

To compare the interaction length between pharmacy staff and patients, as well as their job satisfaction, in community pharmacies with and without automation.

Portuguese community pharmacies with and without automation.

This cross-sectional study followed a quasi-experimental design, divided in two phases. In the first, paired community pharmacies with and without automation were purposively selected for a non-participant overt observation. The second phase comprised a job satisfaction questionnaire of both pharmacists and technical staff. Practitioners and patients demographic and interactional data, as well as job satisfaction, were statistically compared across automation.

Interaction length and job satisfaction.

Sixty-eight practitioners from 10 automated and non-automated pharmacies produced 721 registered interaction episodes. Automation had no significant influence in interaction duration, controlling for gender and professional categories, being significantly longer with older patients (p = 0.017). On average, staff working at the pharmacy counter had 45 % of free time from direct patient contact. The mean overall satisfaction in this sample was 5.52 (SD = 0.98) out of a maximum score of seven, with no significant differences with automation as well as between professional categories, only with a significant lower job satisfaction for younger pharmacists.

As with previous studies in other settings, duration of the interactions was not influenced by pharmacy automation, as well as practitioners' job satisfaction, while practitioners' time constrains seem to be a subjective perception.