Free But Valuable: The Economic Significance of Services Provided by Portuguese Pharmacies

• Autor(a) principal: Gouveia, M
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Machado, F, Mendes, Z
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://revista.farmacoterapia.pt/index.php/rpf/article/view/245

ObjectivesBesides dispensing medicines, pharmacies render other services including advice on health problems and on the best use of medicines; detecting problems in patients’ medications; counseling on nutrition, etc. The majority of these services is free. Up to now, the volume of these services in Portugal were unknown. This paper presents 2008 estimates for the volume of pharmacy interventions and their economic value. Methods The data came from two 2008 surveys. A pharmacy survey was designed to estimate the volume and cost of the free interventions in community pharmacies in Portugal. In a general population survey, respondents answered a set of questions (choice experiments) designed to elicit their willingness to pay for a few typical services provided for free at community pharmacies. ResultsWe estimate a total of 38.8 million free pharmacy interventions in 2008, 3.7 interventions per inhabitant. The top three pharmacy interventions were advice on non-prescription medicines, advice on prescription-only medicines and counseling related to point-of care measurements and monitoring (cholesterol, pregnancy, etc.) and they used 2.8 million hours of work, about 13% of the total hours of work, at a cost of a54 million. This cost was equivalent to 20% of the pharmacies’ gross income. We estimated the willingness to pay for the three main pharmacy interventions by conjoint analysis. The aggregate value of the services provided was estimated at a76.5 million. The net value, from society’s perspective, for the three interventions was estimated to be a 51 million. Conclusions We found the volume of services provided at no charge to be significant, as were the resulting pharmacies’ costs. The benefits to consumers were even larger generating a substantial net benefit to society. Published in: ISPOR 12th Annual European Congress, October, 2009 Paris, France.