Background: Close cooperation between pharmacists and physicians to provide higher levels of healthcare to community especially in ambulatory care is important. Both physicians and pharmacists experience professional problems in working with each other and have certain expectations from each other. The objective of this study was to evaluate professional problems between physicians and pharmacists.
Methods: This study was performed on randomly-selected physicians and pharmacists working in private or public centers in Mashhad, Iran. Subjects voluntarily answered to a predesigned questionnaire containing questions about their demographic characteristics, the most usual problems and expectations in collaboration with pharmacists or physicians and their supposed solutions to improve this collaborative work. These impact of demographic characteristics on the responses were statistically analyzed by SPSS software.
Results: Twenty-five physicians and 25 pharmacists were enrolled. Among physicians participated in this study, 60% and among pharmacists 68% were women. Mean (SD) age of physicians was 38.1 ± 9.2 and the mean age of pharmacists was 35.1 ± 10.8 years. The most frequent problems posed by the pharmacists were bad handwriting of physicians (92%), not-written dosage and way of consumption (48%) and lack of consultation and lack of trust to pharmacists (36%). The most common problems of physicians in working relationships with pharmacists were selling prescription-only medications without a physician's order (80%), scientific interference in working with physicians and explaining to the patient that the wrong medication is prescribed by a physician (72%) delivery of wrong medication to the patient by pharmacists (60%). To resolve this problem, both groups emphasized the need for consultation meetings.
Conclusion: Both physicians and pharmacists need to identify the most important problems in cooperation with each other and solve them to improve general public health and reduce medication failures.