Exploring the patient perspective regarding community pharmacists' educational roles in diabetes medication and blood glucose management

摘要

Objective Applying role theory, we studied patients' beliefs about community pharmacists' roles and corresponding unaddressed educational needs in the area of diabetes medication and blood glucose management.Setting United States, nationwide sample.Method Persons with diabetes were surveyed by mail. Inclusion criteria required individuals to be non-institutionalised adults (>18 years old) with type 1 or type 2 diabetes and taking at least one prescription diabetes medication.Key findings The most-frequent role beliefs for pharmacists included teaching patients about how to reduce the cost of their medications and about side-effects and symptom management. The most common unaddressed need reported by patients was reducing their drug costs, and those who reported at least one unaddressed need were more likely to be younger, female and black. Ten per cent of patients believed that only a pharmacist is able to educate them about medication and blood glucose management. Compared with the remainder of the study sample, these patients were on average more-highly educated, more-recently diagnosed, and visited their pharmacy more often in the last 30days seeking advice from a pharmacist and non-prescription medications. Notably, they also reported fewer unaddressed needs overall.Conclusion Knowing the beliefs of a person with diabetes regarding who is capable of educating them about medication and blood glucose management, and knowing their related unaddressed educational needs is useful to community pharmacists who serve these patients as well as to pharmacy management as the profession continues to move forward to provide advanced care to patients with diabetes.