Evaluating patient feedback of pharmacist consultations across multiple clinical outpatient specialties

Background

Pharmacists are effective members of hospital multidisciplinary teams in both inpatient and outpatient settings and have an essential role in medicines optimisation. Outpatient care is provided for several reasons including medication reviews. Pharmacists are well placed to conduct these reviews. Within the NHS Lothian Pharmacy Service, pharmacists deliver approximately 120 outpatient clinic sessions a month across 15 specialities.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) Standards for Hospital Pharmacy state that views should be sought from service users to inform the development, improvement, and delivery of pharmacy services.

Research in clinical pharmacy outpatient services has focussed on clinical interventions or clinics within specific specialties. This project applied a standardised approach to evaluate patient feedback of pharmacist consultations across multiple clinical specialties.

Objectives

1. Develop a method to evaluate patient feedback on multiple outpatient clinical pharmacy services.
2. Evaluate patient perception of pharmacist consultation skills in the outpatient setting.

Method

The study was conducted over a three-month period (November 2023 to January 2024) and included four outpatient clinical pharmacy services (dermatology, gastroenterology, respiratory and rheumatology).

A questionnaire was developed using the RPS patient feedback survey and a maximum of two additional closed, service specific questions. The standardised questions used a four-point scale, ranging from ‘poor to fair’ to ‘excellent’. The questionnaire was reviewed by a local patient information team. The questionnaire was accessed via a service specific patient information leaflet with a quick response (QR) code and completed electronically using an online survey platform.

Convenience sampling was used and all patients attending a pharmacist outpatient consultation (face-to-face, virtual or telephone) included in the study were invited to provide feedback on their experience.

No patient data was collected during the study and results were anonymous. This study did not require ethics approval. Local quality and governance review was undertaken. 

Results

Of the 282 consultations conducted, 65 patients completed the questionnaire (a 23% response rate). 86% of responders (n=56) rated their consultation with the pharmacist as excellent and 12% (n=8) rated the overall consultation as good. Pharmacists’ ability to make patients feel at ease and provide explanations was highlighted as a strength: 83% (n=54) stated outpatient pharmacists were excellent at making patients feel at ease. Information provision was rated as excellent by 83% of responders (n=54) and consistently across clinical specialties (75-86%).

Conclusions

Whilst recognising the response rate was less than ideal, those patients who did respond reported an overall positive experience of outpatient pharmacist consultations across multiple specialties in the outpatient setting.

Using a standardised questionnaire and collating the results across specialties enabled broader evaluation of the outpatient clinical pharmacy service. Locally, work is ongoing to introduce patient feedback as a key performance indicator for outpatient clinical pharmacy services.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the UKCPA or its members. We encourage readers to follow links and references to primary research papers and guidance.

Additional authors: Naomi Scott, Claire O’Hare, Ewan Swann, Sylwia Michlewska, Amanda McLean. NHS Lothian Pharmacy Service, Edinburgh

Competing interest statement:

The author declares: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.