An evaluation of pharmacy services on cardiovascular wards from nurses’ perspective

Abstract

Background: Evaluation of pharmacy services helps to improve the quality of services and the patient care accordingly. One of the tools to evaluate the quality of services is to measure customer satisfaction. The objectives of this project were to evaluate the pharmacy services on cardiovascular wards from the nurses’ perspective in order to make recommendations to improve the service. Method: This service evaluation study was conducted at Guy’s and St Thomas` NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT) during a six-week period. A one-page 20-item questionnaire was developed a piloted using a five-point Likert type scale to capture nurses’ opinion. All qualified nursing staff who worked on the seven cardiovascular wards at GSTT were eligible to complete the questionnaire. Quantitative and qualitative analysis were conducted to measure nurses’ satisfaction. Results: 62 completed questionnaires were returned for a response rate of 34.4%. The overall satisfaction rate with the pharmacy services was 88.7%. The two domains that nurses were more satisfied with are medicines information and multidisciplinary team. 23 participants responded to the open-ended question and suggested areas for improvements. There were no significant differences when comparing the satisfaction between all nurses’ demographic characteristics and the seven different domains. Conclusion: The results indicated that overall, nurses reported a high level of satisfaction with the pharmacy services. Based on the questionnaire findings several suggestions to improve pharmacy services have been made, including more pharmacy support at night and in the weekends, ward rounds, and improvement of supply and discharge services.