현재와 미래 약국서비스에 대한 약사의 인식

Abstract

Objective: We conducted a survey to understand the current state of pharmacy services and pharmacists’ thoughts in thefuture of the community pharmacy setting. Methods: A questionnaire was distributed to 229 pharmacists and gathered from 95respondents. Results: We asked to pharmacists about what the ideal pharmacy duty should be in the next 10 years at thecommunity pharmacy setting in Korea. For this question, the respondents said drug counselling (19.4%), dispensing (13.8%), longtermcare of chronic disease and healthcare education (12.8%), and OTC counselling (11.5%). When asked about how much timethey were spending doing certain tasks in the pharmacy, the main tasks were dispensing (23.5%), counselling (17.1%), prescriptionreview (10.1%), and OTC counselling (5.5%). When asked about what the most important duty of a pharmacist was, medicationcounselling (45.4%) was the most important task that they identified and the reasons for not being able to fulfill this role properlywas time shortage (78.9%) followed by the lack of counselling spaces, up-to-date knowledges, and focus on financial gains overpatient counselling. Conclusion: Korean pharmacists are mainly focusing on dispensing in their daily work. Their basicresponsibilities can be easily mechanized over the next few years, but the social expectations of disease-prevention and publichealth promotion both in current and future can not be replaced by such mechanical measures. Therefore, pharmaceutical servicesin Korea should be developed in more diverse and professional ways.