Scholarly record

REENGINEERING QUALITY OF PHARMACEUTICAL CARE SERVICES: THE CASE STUDY OF LATVIA

G. Grinberga-Zalite

Abstract

Nowadays, access to medicine is a crucial precondition for many disease prevention programmes and the treatment component of virtually all diseases. The availability of qualitative pharmaceutical care services is an integral part of the national welfare system, thus their quality maintenance and improvement under conditions of budget austerity is one of the main challenges for policy makers and pharmaceutical companies. The current research is a continuation of several related research projects implemented in scope of service quality evaluation and reengineering of pharmaceutical service quality in Latvia. The research aim was to describe the regulatory framework of pharmaceutical care industry in Latvia and analyse customer expectations and real performance of pharmaceutical care service quality at the largest pharmacy network in Latvia. The analysis of pharmaceutical service quality clearly shows that the role of pharmacistВ’s professionalism is the most important quality dimension; therefore, extensive quality evaluations should be organized on regular basis. However, retrospective evaluation of service quality can only partly reveal quality level; thus, the author recommends service providers to use a combined quality evaluation system which includes both identifying of customer expectations and their real experience of using the service afterwards comparing those evaluations to detect gaps in service performance. The research results give evidence that the current model of service quality maintenance in the analysed pharmaciesВ’ network has several quality gaps. The overwhelming new product promotions in pharmacies undermine consumer confidence in pharmacists as well as lower the prestige of pharmacistВ’s profession. Consequently, pharmaceutical care service providers have to balance more constructively their business goals with ethical principles.

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