Abstract

PHARMACISTS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE PHARMACY INDUSTRY REPRESENTATIVES IN BULGARIA

Todor Naydenov, Assena Stoimenova*, Maria Kamusheva, Valentina Petkova,
Plamen Dimitrov, Margarita Kassarova, Guenka Petrova

ABSTRACT

The effective communication between the medical specialists and pharmacy industry representatives is very important. Essential parts of the published surveys in this area are related to the attitude of the physicians towards the medical sales representatives. Although there are lots of studies focused on the influence of pharmaceutical industry on physicians, investigations about the pharmacists’ attitude toward the medical sales representatives are lacking. The goal of our survey is to measure the pharmacists„ attitude towards the pharmaceutical industry representatives in Bulgaria, as well as to identify any problems and eventually the possibilities for improving the communication process between the two parties. The study was conducted among 320 pharmacists from the major regional Bulgarian towns during JanuaryJune 2013. The questions concerned the number of representatives’ visits per week, the average duration of a single visit, the importance of gender and education of the representative, the type of information given by the representatives etc. The questionnaires were processed by Excel and SPSS programs and ANOVA analysis and chi-square test of independence. The pharmacists recognized the medical sales representatives as a main source of information about new medicinal products especially concerning the trade elements – promotions and advertisements. They define that shortage of time is the main reason for delaying meetings with the representatives. A large number of the respondents defined the communication skills and the presentation of competitive products information as essential elements of pharmacists-industry interaction.

Keywords: pharmacy industry representatives, pharmacists’ attitude, communication.