Abstract
The pace of practice change in community pharmacy over the past decade has been significant, yet there is little evidence documenting implementation of change in the profession. Kotter's change management model was selected as a theoretical framework for this exploratory qualitative study. Community pharmacists were interviewed using a semistructured protocol based on Kotter's model. Data were analyzed and coded using a constant-comparative iterative method aligned with the stages of change management outlined by Kotter. Twelve community pharmacists were interviewed. Three key themes emerged: 1) the profession has successfully established the urgency to, and created a climate conducive for, change; 2) the profession has been less successful in engaging and enabling the profession to actually implement change; and 3) legislative changes (for example, expansion of pharmacists' scope of practice) may have occurred prematurely, prior to other earlier stages of the change process being consolidated. As noted by most participants, allowing change is not implementing change: pharmacists reported feeling underprepared and lacking confidence to actually make change in their practices and believe that more emphasis on practical, specific implementation tactics is needed. Change management is complex and time and resource intensive. There is a need to provide personalized, detailed, context-specific implementation strategies to pharmacists to allow them to take full advantage of expanded scope of practice.
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