Browsing by Subject "rahoitus"

Background and objectives: Pharmaceutical services provided by community pharmacies have the potential to improve medication safety and support the implementation of rational pharmacotherapy. The pharmaceutical services are internationally an underused resource to support functioning of social and health care services. The literature review of this Master’s thesis provides an overview of pharmaceutical services, - their funding and remuneration. The primary objective of the empirical study was to create an overview of the development of the pharmaceutical services in Finnish community pharmacies in 2010-2020. The secondary objective was to study differences in the service provision between Finnish provinces. Materials and methods: The study was carried out as a retrospective descriptive survey study annually conducted by the Association of Finnish Pharmacies. Åland was excluded from the provincial review so that individual pharmacies could not be identified. The data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel. The number of pharmacies providing pharmaceutical services annually and the annual number of customers using these services were counted at the national level. At the provincial level, the corresponding data for the prescribing review, medication review, comprehensive medication review and assessment of inhalation technique were analyzed for the years 2017-2020. Results and conclusions: The most common service with the highest number of customers was automated dose dispensing. The second most common service was prescription review. As a whole, the provision of services and the number of customers had increased during the study period in Finnish community pharmacies. Manual dose dispensing was a diminishing service. Differences were found between provinces in the prevalence of services and in the number of customers. It was possible to identify provinces with lower service provision activity, such as Lapland. The service provision prevalence and number of customers varied widely within provinces. The number of customers for a certain service in an individual pharmacy had a large effect on the provincial average, thus, the average number of customers in the provinces does not reflect the provinces' success in implementation of services. Pharmaceutical services, with the exception of the automated dose dispensing, are not well implemented.