Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 and voluntarism: logistic regression analysis of pharmacist responsibility

To examine the relationship between pharmacists' willingness to assume further professional responsibilities, as measured by attitudes to the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA '90) requirements, and their attitudes toward voluntarism as their responsibility to society and their level of interest in their jobs.

A survey was distributed to a convenience sample of 443 pharmacists who were asked to indicate their responses on a number of items.

Surveys were distributed to participants in an annual pharmacy continuing education program.

The response rate was 65 percent with completed surveys from 290 Florida pharmacists who were typically male (73 percent) and practicing in the community setting (39 percent) for over 25 years (33 percent).

Questions were aimed at gathering the following information: (1) demographics; (2) attitudes concerning the benefits of the three OBRA '90 requirements: patient counseling, prospective drug-use review (DUR), and information recording; (3) attitudes toward voluntarism; and (4) job interest.

Pharmacists tended to agree that all three of the OBRA '90 mandates will be beneficial. Fifty-six percent favored the prospective DUR requirements, while 68 percent favored the patient counseling requirements and 66 percent favored the information-recording requirements. Logistic regression analysis showed that unit increases in scaled responses, indicating more favorable attitudes toward believing that voluntarism was one's responsibility, increased the odds of favoring counseling by 38.7 percent and information recording by 32.4 percent. A similar directional relationship was found for the DUR requirement. Job interest did not add to the predictive ability of the variables already in the models.

This study suggests a possible association between pharmacists' attitudes toward social responsibility and their acceptance of expanded professional responsibility.