Patients' Perceptions of Community Pharmacy Services

Abstract

The aim of the study was to evaluate patients' perceptions of community pharmacy services in the North-Eastern region of Romania, through an anonymous online questionnaire. The statistical data analysis of the answers of 323 patients was done in the SPSS 27.0 program. The majority of respondents had positive perceptions towards community pharmacy services in general (72.7% of respondents), the discounts of the medicines through their loyalty card (74.9% of respondents), the attitude of the pharmacist (69.9% of respondents), the confidence in the pharmacist (81.1% of respondents) and pharmacist's advice (83.3% of respondents), as well as the promptness of releasing medicines (76.4% of respondents) and the availability of medicines (75.5% of respondents). However, most of the respondents were dissatisfied with the price of medicines. Statistically significant correlations between some responses and some patient characteristics <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$(\mathrm{p} &lt; 0.05)$</tex> generated typologies of patient orientations towards community pharmacy services. The vast majority of the population studied had a positive attitude towards community pharmacy services, expressed by high levels of satisfaction.