Background

The NHS Plan published by the Government in July 2000, aims to ensure that all NHS prescriptions are electronically transmitted by 2004. The emphasis is to streamline and improve service to patients and facilitate closer working relationships between health care professionals. Previous research however, has revealed that pharmacists are unsure of the benefits of the electronic transmission of prescriptions (Anderson, and Malone, 1999; Kember Associates, 1997; United Business Media, 2000).

Objectives

This paper aims to investigate pharmacist's attitudes and concerns about the electronic transmission of prescriptions (ETP) prior to the implementation of ETP.

Method

A postal questionnaire and subsequent follow-up reminder letters were sent to a total of 77 pharmacists who will be participating in the first wave of ETP in three different pilot consortia across the UK. Each consortium recruited the participating pharmacies and provided contact details to the researchers. Among other quantitative details about the pharmacies, the questionnaire was designed to address pharmacists' attitudes towards ETP prior to utilising the system. This included attitudes towards potential changes in practice within the pharmacy and benefits to GPs and patients, all of which were rated on a 5-point Likert scale. Descriptive statistics and frequencies were obtained using SPSS for Windows (Version 9.0).

Results

Sixty-four pharmacists returned the questionnaire, which obtained an 83% response rate.

Many respondents held no strong opinion on how ETP would affect their day-to-day practice. For example, a third of pharmacists were unsure if ETP would reduce pharmacy paperwork (32%) or pharmacy workload (33%). Furthermore, they were uncertain if ETP would help reduce the number of prescribing and labelling errors (43% and 40% respectively). There was some consensus that ETP would save the GP time (51%); in contrast a third did not think that ETP would save them time (32%). However, a substantial number of pharmacists are hopeful that ETP will help to spread the dispensing load more evenly across the day (42%).

With regard to patients, many pharmacists agreed that ETP will reduce patient waiting time in the pharmacy (51%), but were divided about whether ETP would result in loss of over the counter or non-pharmacy sales (30%, and a further 30% were neutral).

Conclusions

ETP has undoubtedly engaged interest within the pharmacy profession. At the present time pharmacists have no experience of the system and so do not have past experience to base their opinions on. We will be evaluating whether these attitudes change when the ETP pilot project does begin. However, this baseline questionnaire did not identify any major concerns of participants.

References

Anderson, K. L. and Malone, P. M. (1999). Electronic Prescriptions in Pharmacy (Letter). American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 56 (13), 1351-1353.

Kember Associates (1997). Focus Groups with GPs and Pharmacists. Pharmed, editor.

United Business Media (2000). Chemist and Druggist: Business Trends Survey , Quarterly Four. Chemist and Druggist editor.