The importance that community pharmacists in Malta place on the introduction of pharmaceutical care

The results from a study to assess the importance Maltese pharmacists place d on various aspects of pharmaceutical care and their willingness to provid e such care are reported. A modified version of the Behavioural Pharmaceuti cal Care Scale (BPCS) questionnaire (consisting of three dimensions and 14 domains) was mailed to the 198 privately owned community pharmacies in Malt a. A total of 99 questionnaires were returned following two reminder teleph one calls. Pharmacists were asked to score the importance of each pharmaceutical care activity contained in the modified BPCS on a 6 point Likert scale ranging f rom 0 to 5. The overall score for the questionnaire, which illustrated the importance pharmacists attributed to various aspects of pharmaceutical care , ranged from 90 to 170 with a mean score of 134.8. There was little differ ence recorded between the scores for the three dimensions. The Referral and Consultation domain recorded a slightly higher score than the other two do mains. Younger pharmacists obtained significantly higher scores (p > 0.05; Kruskal-Wallis test) in the Verification of Patient Understanding domain. Approximately 72% of respondents indicated that they were willing to provid e pharmaceutical care, but remarked that a number of issues e.g. reimbursem ent, qualified support staff, GP-pharmacist co-operation, had to be address ed. A series of strategic steps are needed to help pharmacists resolve thes e issues before pharmaceutical care programmes could be offered by Maltese community pharmacists.