Browsing by Subject "Delfi-metoden"

The Finnish Medicines Agency, Fimea, is the authority responsible for supervision pharmacies in Finland. Recently, there has been more interest in Fimea to improve its supervision of community pharmacies. For this purpose, a questionnaire was made. Prior to the making of the questionnaire, community pharmacy supervision practices were studied in Nordic countries and in the UK. Additionally, faults found in Finnish community pharmacy inspections in 2016–2018 were classified by analysing anonymized fault lists (n=94) separated from inspection reports. When the most common faults were identified, it was possible to include questions concerning these faults into the questionnaire. A modified version of the Delphi method was used when developing the questionnaire. Comments on the applicability of the questions were given by a panel of experts consisting of inspectors of Fimea. The questionnaire was subsequently edited in accordance with the given comments. Separate versions of the questionnaire form were developed for community pharmacies and for their subsidiary pharmacies. At the end of this study, the questionnaire was sent to seven pharmacies and to three subsidiary pharmacies. After the results of the questionnaire were collected, Fimea gave feedback on the questionnaire. 25 categories were created by classifying faults found from pharmacy inspections. The most common inspection observations were faults in storage condition monitoring (97 % of pharmacies), narcotics (86 %), implementation of code of conduct (86 %), product errors (86 %) and preparation of medicines ready for use (81 %). The questionnaire begins by asking basic information about the pharmacy. Following questions concern the personnel and their further adequacy training. The questionnaire also includes several questions on the code of conduct within the pharmacy. Additionally, there are questions about storage condition monitoring, dispensary and accounting of narcotics. At the end of the questionnaire, there are also a few questions about the European Medicines Verification System (EMVS) which will be implemented by February 2019. Support from the inspectors of Fimea and studying regulations of pharmacies helped identify appropriate questions for the questionnaire. However, the perspective of the questionnaire may be limited due to the questionnaire being developed based up on faults found from inspections. The faults observed from inspections across pharmacies in Finland have been very similar with some of them being also alarmingly common. Because many of the observed faults are relatively easy to fix, simple corrective measures could be implemented to improve the situation across several pharmacies. Thus, usage of questionnaires, such as one made in this study, could be considered a feasible way of improving supervision of pharmacies.