The community pharmacy practice change towards patient-centered care in Saudi Arabia: a qualitative perspective
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(2020) 13:59
RESEARCH
Open Access
The community pharmacy practice change towards patient-centered care in Saudi Arabia: a qualitative perspective Muhammad Kamran Rasheed1,2* , Abdulmajeed Alqasoumi1, Syed Shahzad Hasan2 and Zaheer-Ud-Din Babar2
Keywords: Community pharmacy, Saudi Arabia, Qualitative research, Stakeholders, Patient-centered care, Healthcare consumer
Introduction The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has made tremendous improvements in its health care infrastructure in a short span of time [1]. Socioeconomic changes in the KSA led to the rise of the middle-class, which means an inevitable increased future demand for health care [2–4]. Although per capita total healthcare has increased to US$1004 in 2015 and the total health expenditure is predicted to increase in the US$44 billion by 2019, growing lifestyle diseases had become a major challenge for the government of the KSA [5–7]. Consequently, there is an increased burden on the Ministry of Health (MoH) to provide primary health care, and the shortages of trained health care professionals at primary health care settings make the situation more challenging [2, 8]. The changing cultural expectation of the need to see a doctor for relatively minor symptoms also increases demand, although arguably not needed [1, 2, 6, 7]. Previous studies in the KSA have reported that many Saudi healthcare consumers frequently visit their local community pharmacy for multiple reasons, including diseaserelated advice, purchasing over-the-counter (OTC) or cosmetic products, and procuring prescription medicines for the treatment or prevention of the progression of chronic conditions [2, 3, 9–11]. The community pharmacies are * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Pharmacy Practice, College of Pharmacy, Qassim University, Buraydah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2 Department of Pharmacy, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield HD1 3DH, UK
highly accessible across the KSA, and it is convenient for health care consumers to approach the community pharmacist without appointments or referrals [3, 10, 12]. Furthermore, Saudi health care consumers expect the community pharmacists to play a significant role in improving the health outcomes [3, 9, 10]. Therefore, pharmacists’ involvement in raising public health awareness at the community level and educating the public on prevention and monitoring of lifestyle diseases and improving the quality use of medicines can play a significant role in decreasing the morbidity and mortality from chronic diseases like ischemic heart diseases and diabetes mellitus [3, 5–7, 13]. The potential for community pharmacists to fill the capacity gap in providing extended patient-centered care services to patients in the KSA is a much-needed initiative [3, 14]. Given that the Saudi government has emphasized public-private partnerships for effective primary health care in its vision 2030, there is a significant opportunity for community pharmacies to be part of that vision [2, 4, 15]. Numerous studies conducted in the KSA agreed in principle ab
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