Customer assessment of long-term care pharmacy provider services

Abstract

Objective: Assess performance of long-term care pharmacy providers on key services offered to nursing facilities.

Design: Cross-sectional; nursing facility team.

Setting: Random phone survey of nursing facility team members.

Participants: 485 nursing facility team members (practicing in nursing facilities, interacting with > or = 1 consultant pharmacist); 46 members excluded, unable to identify facility's pharmacy provider.

Intervention: Directors of nursing, medical directors, and administrators were asked to rate long-term care pharmacy provider performance of eight commonly offered pharmacy services.

Main outcome measure: All groups evaluated pharmacy provider performance of these services using a five-point scale. Results are broken down by employer type.

Results: Average rating for eight pharmacy services was 3.64. Top two services: "Labeling medications accurately" ranked in top 1-2 services for all groups (combined rating of 3.97) and "Provides medication administration system" ranked in top 1-3 services for all groups (combined rating of 3.95). One service, "Provides educational inservices," ranked lowest for all groups (combined rating of 3.54).

Conclusions: In general, when looking at the eight services in combination for all providers, all services were ranked between Good and Very Good (average score of 3.64). Therefore, while the pharmacy provider is performing above average for these services, there is room for improvement in all of these services. These results can be used as a benchmark. Detailed data results and sample surveys are available online at www.ascp.com/supplements. These surveys can be used by the pharmacy provider to solicit assessments from their own facilities on these services.