Characterizing the professional relationships of community pharmacists.
BACKGROUND
The use of the term "patient" to describe individuals served by pharmacists may affect expectations, roles, and responsibilities. Whereas this term has been widely accepted and embraced within the profession, there is little empirical evidence to justify its use in the pharmacy practice context.


OBJECTIVE
To describe and characterize the type of relationships that form between community pharmacists and the individuals they serve.


METHODS
A qualitative study was undertaken with pharmacist-volunteers. Participants were asked to maintain a written diary over a 10-day period, in which their workplace experiences were documented. Responses to cued questions as well as free-form notes were analyzed to form a typology. Through successive iterations using confirmatory focus groups consisting of study participants, a final typology was developed.


RESULTS
A total of 45 pharmacists participated in this study. The final typology describes 5 distinct idealized types of relationships formed by pharmacists: analytic-authoritative, emotive-interactive, opportunistic-expedient, reliant-paternalistic, and autonomous-informative.


CONCLUSIONS
The complexity of practice suggests that the "patient-pharmacist" paradigm for understanding relationships in pharmacy does not adequately capture the variety of day-to-day interactions that pharmacists encounter. Pharmacists engage in a variety of adaptive and responsive strategies to meet expressed and implicit needs of the individuals they serve.
Austin
Zubin
Z
Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto, 19 Russell Street, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 1A1C. zubin.austin@utoronto.ca
Gregory
Paul A M
PA
Martin
J Craig
JC
D000328:Adult; D002983:Clinical Competence; D003157:Community Pharmacy Services; D005260:Female; D017144:Focus Groups; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009864:Ontario; D010595:Pharmacists; D011361:Professional Competence; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D012107:Research Design