Challenges facing social pharmacy

Defining pharmacy and its practice: a conceptual model for an international audience

Background

There is much fragmentation and little consensus in the use of descriptors for the different disciplines that make up the pharmacy sector. Globalization, reprofessionalization and the influx of other disciplines means there is a requirement for a greater degree of standardization. This has not been well addressed in the pharmacy practice research and education literature.

Objectives

To identify and define the various subdisciplines of the pharmacy sector and integrate them into an internationally relevant conceptual model based on narrative synthesis of the literature.

Methods

A literature review was undertaken to understand the fragmentation in dialogue surrounding definitions relating to concepts and practices in the context of the pharmacy sector. From a synthesis of this literature, the need for this model was justified. Key assumptions of the model were identified, and an organic process of development took place with the three authors engaging in a process of sense-making to theorize the model.

Results

The model is “fit for purpose” across multiple countries and includes two components making up the umbrella term “pharmaceutical practice”. The first component is the four conceptual dimensions, which outline the disciplines including social and administrative sciences, community pharmacy, clinical pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. The second component of the model describes the “acts of practice”: teaching, research and professional advocacy; service and academic enterprise.

Conclusions

This model aims to expose issues relating to defining pharmacy and its practice and to create dialogue. No model is perfect, but there are implications for what is posited in the areas of policy, education and practice and future research. The main point is the need for increased clarity, or at least beginning the discussion to increase the clarity of definition and consistency of meaning in-and-across the pharmacy sector locally, nationally and internationally.

The conflicts between professional and non professional work of community pharmacists in Indonesia

Objective

The study aimed to determine the type of professional and non professional work of community pharmacists in Surabaya Indonesia and find the difference between time spent for performing both works in actual (current) situation and ideal (expected) situation.

Methods

A cross sectional study was conducted by combining purposive sampling for selecting the community pharmacists. Afterwards, the data was analyzed using SPSS v16 to provide the descriptive results and completed with Wilcoxon signed rank test to find the difference between time spent in actual and ideal situation. The sample size was 100 respondents of 300 pharmacists who have been practicing in Surabaya.

Results

From 100 participants just 30 participants gave response to the questionnaire, 67% was female who 20-30 years old at most (53%) with working experience as pharmacist less than 3 years (60%) and working 30 hours per week (60%) in pharmacy. Significant difference between time spent in actual and ideal situation was found.

Discussion

The time spent for performing professional and non professional work in ideal situation was significantly higher than in actual situation except for preparing medicines activity. This finding illustrated that the respondents did not have adequate time to provide ideal services in their daily practice. Therefore, they expected to improve their time and level of work in more professional manner. Surprisingly, they were also willing to provide more time and higher level of work in some non professional work.

Conclusions

The Indonesian community pharmacists spent little time on both professional work and non-professional work in their daily activities. This indicated that the pharmacists did not focus on delivering quality professional work.