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The Thai Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Abstract

Community pharmacies have always played an important role in the health system. Therefore, having a decent service provided by pharmacies is of paramount importance for the healthcare systems. The issue of pharmacy ownership and its possible impact on the quality of services as well as the number of violations, has been argued for many years. However, no research has been performed to investigate this issue, especially in Iran. This study investigates the impact of pharmacists’ and non-pharmacists’ ownership on the pharmacies’ violations and their service quality. Violations were examined using official pharmacy inspection reports and service quality was examined using a standard questionnaire from the viewpoint of the pharmacy customers. As a result, considering violations, no evidence was found to prove a significant relationship between the number of critical and major violations with the type of pharmacy ownership. Similarly, regarding service quality, the results showed that there is no significant relationship between the quality of service and the type of pharmacy ownership in this study. Although we could not prove the impact of pharmacy ownership on the rate of violations as well as service quality, it may be due to more inspections that have been carried out in non-pharmacist-owned pharmacies by regulatory bodies or our study limitation for considering the violations that have not been reported in official reports. The same quality of services in the two types of pharmacies shows that non-pharmacist-owned pharmacies also try to maintain the desired level of service in competition with their pharmacist competitors. According to our finding, more attempt by pharmacists is needed to show their competitive advantages in the field of pharmacy management

DOI

10.56808/3027-7922.2795

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