Researchers EQUIP Pharmacists To Improve Their Work Practices

Main Category: Pharmacy / Pharmacist
Article Date: 20 Oct 2007 - 0:00 PDT

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Academics at Swansea University have been awarded £100,000 to research, amongst other things, how the way community pharmacists feel about their workspaces impacts on their working practices.

The project is being undertaken by the University's Centre for Health Information Research and Evaluation (CHIRAL), and a sponsorship grant has been provided by pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

The project, which runs until May 2008, is part of the Examining Qualitative Enquiry Programme (EQUIP) led by Professor Frances Rapport, Professor of Qualitative Health Research in the School of Medicine, in collaboration with Professor Marcus Doel, a human geographer in the University's School of the Environment and Society.

The research is being undertaken in a wide range of pharmacies, from small, single-store outlets to large chains such as Boots, the Co-op and Tesco.

"The purpose of the research is to gain a better understanding of the attitudes of community pharmacists to their workspace and how these impact on their relationship with the public and their professional working practices," said Professor Rapport.

"There is also the notion of empowering the pharmacists, giving them the opportunity to have their views about their work and their relationship to their work environment taken seriously.

"Ultimately, the study seeks to help improve the quality of the pharmacists' working environment and practices, which in turn has to be good news for the customer."

EQUIP follows a similar research project undertaken last year that looked at how General Practitioners related to their working environment.

Professor Rapport said: "This is not really an area that most people think about, but it is something that has immense impact on the quality and effectiveness of service delivery. After all, the work environment is a major part of our working lives and how we feel about it can affect how we see ourselves and our jobs. This can affect job satisfaction and, ultimately, our performance.

The research with GPs involved giving professionals a camera and asking them to take several pictures of whatever they felt defined their work space. The GPs were also asked to write a biography of their workspace to explore their relationship with it.

Professor Rapport said: "This is quite an unusual research method. Normally, researchers would use traditional methods such as focus groups and questionnaires, but our research demands a different approach to allow us to interpret the images and text provided by the participants.

"We designed an intertextual analysis framework from scratch. We adopted and adapted different sociological and anthropological visual analysis schemas and developed our own visual and textual frameworks."

"The study provided some interesting results in terms of understanding how GPs relate to their workspaces and how these relationships can impact on working practices. It showed that GPs generally manage with the spaces available to them and appear to have found ways of overcoming certain limitations, such as small spaces, to work as effectively as possible."

"But it was interesting to see that the GPs felt their PCs had become central to the consultation. Computers appeared in a majority of the pictures from the participants, almost as a third person. There was also evidence of how the GPs expressed their individuality by personalising even domesticating their offices."

The idea of personal expression raises other issues, such as to what extent it is appropriate for GPs to express their individuality.

"For instance," said Professor Rapport, "GPs queried whether they should have family pictures on display, when there is a good chance that they will be required to advise families who are childless, or infertile patients."

The research papers that resulted from the study led to the collaborative proposal with AstraZeneca to design a programme that further develops the research methods and employs them in community pharmacies.

SWANSEA UNIVERSITY
Singleton Park
Swansea
SA2 8PP
http://www.swan.ac.uk

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