Prioritising recommendations to advance community pharmacy practice

Introduction: The nature of community pharmacy in many countries has changed. Despite the significant efforts made to change practice, there is a paucity of literature that highlights consensus on the approaches that should be prioritised for advancing practice particularly in the context of developing countries. Objective: To systematically identify and prioritise a range of potential recommendations to improve practice in Indonesian community pharmacy from the perspective of pharmacy stakeholders. Methods: Qualitative research using Nominal Group Technique (NGT) was conducted in July 2017 involving 34 nationwide pharmacy stakeholders. Participants were assigned to four nominal group discussions based on the areas for action as developed by researchers. The results were thematically analysed. Results: Nine priority recommendations were generated from the group discussion reflecting four main themes to advance community pharmacy sector, namely improving professional pharmacy practice, reforming pharmacy education, enforcing policy and regulation and enhancing public recognition of pharmacists. The analysis using the culture-structure-agency approach highlights that the top down structure in terms of policy and regulatory framework has not been effectively enforced. In addition, the role of pharmacists as the central agency in delivering pharmacy services has been limited due to their common absence from practice. The approach, however, provides an alternative to advocate changes by locating the role of pharmacists and community pharmacy as central agency within the challenging health system structure. Conclusions: The recommendations generated from and approach used in this study provide an impetus to advance community pharmacy practice in Indonesia. Amongst the important solutions, there is substantial need to provide evidence of pharmacists' contribution to healthcare.