Carers also placed greater importance on a private consultation a

Carers also placed greater importance on a private consultation area to discuss medication than participants with chronic conditions. Alternatively, respecting personal

needs and values was more important for consumers. Discussion Overall, participants primarily utilise community pharmacies for medication advice, which corroborates selleck chem findings from the project’s semistructured interviews36 and a recent Australian study.5 Indeed, all parties, consumers, carers and pharmacists, recognised the importance of pharmacists to provide individualised medication advice. This outcome aligns with our study population who are likely to be regular medication users, carers who assist with medication management, or both. This is therefore a service that pharmacies need to continue to deliver to this population, with an emphasis also on how it is delivered, that is, in a personalised way. Ultimately, when asked to rate the importance of specific pharmacy services, how services were delivered rated higher than what was delivered. Although there were differences in importance ratings for some services between pharmacists and consumers and carers, in this respect, pharmacists were of the same opinion, demonstrating a good understanding of what was important to these consumers, that is, patient-centred

care. Strengths and limitations By exploring what services are important to people with chronic conditions and their carers, and how this differs from their current use of pharmacy and the views of pharmacists, this study provides valuable insights regarding service development and delivery

for these consumers. There has been limited research in this area for such a diverse group of people with chronic conditions, or carers, and a further strength of this study was its consumer-driven approach. Furthermore, this study was informed by previous findings from the larger project,17 36–38 which also strengthens the above results. However, there are some limitations to this work. The results may not be generalisable to countries with different healthcare systems from Australia. The researchers could not ascertain if the services participants did not access were actually available Drug_discovery in the pharmacy they used. There was also the risk of investigator bias caused by utilising a mixture of face-to-face and telephone data collection methods. However, this is also recognised as a strength in terms of data triangulation, and ensured that groups that might be considered difficult to reach, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and culturally and linguistically diverse participants, had the opportunity to participate.

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