People most often encounter pharmacists in a pharmacy. Pharmacists play an important part in pharmaceutical treatment, during which they provide advice on dispensing medicine. It is important that the spatial arrangement of the pharmacy is adequate in order for pharmacists to perform well and provide quality advice. In most countries of the European region there are laws that regulate how the premises must be arranged to be appropriate for carrying out pharmacy activity. Pharmacies across different countries vary in size and type, and consequently have differently arranged premises. This can affect the satisfaction, trust, and privacy of patients, as well as the professional image of pharmacists and the risk of pharmacist error.
In Slovenia, no research has yet been done in the area of spatial arrangement of pharmacies and pharmacists’ and patients’ views on the arrangement of the part of the pharmacy where consulting takes place. Therefore, our primary objective was to determine what the patients’ and pharmacists’ views were on the spatial arrangement of the consulting area. We formed the interviews for the patients and pharmacists based on a prior review of literature. We asked the interviewees what they considered positive about the spatial arrangement of the pharmacy, what they would like to see change about it, and what ideas they had to improve the quality of work of pharmacists and the well-being of patients. We were also interested in how the spatial arrangement affects the work of pharmacists and the importance of the spatial arrangement of the consulting area during patient visits. We analysed the socio-demographic data using descriptive statistics, and the content analysis of the interviews was analysed qualitatively using the Nvivo program. Throughout the entire analysis, we coded the data into 32 different topics, which we classified into 6 categories that represent areas related to wishes and expectations regarding the spatial arrangement of the consulting area: 'Sales part of the pharmacy', 'Arrangement of the counter and dispensing points', 'General arrangement of the consulting area, 'Impacts of the spatial arrangement of the consulting area, 'Waiting' and 'Location and exterior of the pharmacy'.
Based on the analysis of interviews with pharmacists and patients, we formed questionnaires for a pilot research, which we used to verify that the questions were adequately formed and understandable. We found that most interviewees had no difficulties answering the questions.
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