Abstracts by keywords: Demand Estimation
Since 2009, Germany has experienced a decline in the number of community pharmacies, prompting the Bavarian State Ministry of Health, Care and Prevention (StMGP) to commission a project to analyze pharmacy supply in Bavaria, which is being supported by the Bavarian State Office for Health and Food Safety (LGL) in technical and administrative terms. One subproject is concerned with estimating the demand for pharmacies and pharmacy staff based on routine data from statutory health insurance. In order to capture specific features of the pharmacy market relevant to the demand estimate, seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders in self-governing organizations and service providers and then inductively coded. Overall, the experts considered the number of medicines dispensed at the expense of the statutory health insurance fund to be a suitable indicator for quantifying a pharmacy's services. However, they recommended considering certain additional services, such as the dispensing of over-the-counter medicines or other time-consuming activities such as the preparation of prescriptions or cytostatic drugs. Furthermore, the experts considered it sensible to consider all community pharmacies, regardless of their supplementary care mandate. Due to the multitude of influencing factors, the staffing of pharmacies was described as highly individual, and a distinction between prescribing activities by pharmaceutical technicians and licensed pharmacists was considered complex. The experts also emphasized the importance of accessibility for demand estimation and considered time frames of up to 30 minutes to be the maximum reasonable. As an alternative approach to demand estimation, the interviewees assessed determining a ratio of residents that a pharmacy can serve as difficult to quantify ad hoc and also highly dependent on population- and pharmacy-related factors. To counteract the potential undersupply in individual regions identified by the demand estimation, the respondents particularly advocated financial incentives. The majority of the experts surveyed supported the proposed method of estimating needs and were able to provide additional valuable insights by highlighting the specific features of the pharmacy market.