Survey: Frontline pharmacists fighting flu fears
Questions, concerns abound—including some among pharmacists
themselves.
As the nation’s most accessible health professional,
pharmacists are accustomed to getting lots of questions from consumers.
But in this year of influenza fears, the nation’s third largest
group of health professionals is fielding on average about four dozen
queries each week about seasonal and 2009 novel A/H1N1 influenza,
according to a nonscientific Pulse on Pharmacy Survey conducted by APhA
on October 24.
Nearly four in five pharmacists—78%—indicated that they
have already been vaccinated against seasonal influenza, and another 14%
said they were going to do so. When asked about H1N1 vaccine, which was
just beginning to be available at the time of the poll, just 6% had been
vaccinated, with another 66% intending to be immunized.
Those figures are similar to what APhA has seen among pharmacists
participating in influenza webinars, where about one-third of
pharmacists said they were not planning to be immunized against A/H1N1
influenza.
"The number of pharmacists indicating they have or will get immunized
against this pandemic strain of influenza (72%) is higher than the
proportion of health care workers—about 46%—who do get their
seasonal influenza vaccinations each year," Mitch Rothholz, BPharm, MBA,
APhA’s Chief of Staff and leader of a staff H1N1 task force, said.
"In addition, we noticed an interesting pattern during our webinars on
pandemic influenza. Fewer pharmacists said they weren’t going to
get immunized after the session than before it. In other words, the more
pharmacists knew about H1N1, the more likely they were to get
immunized." Through education, information and experience with the 2009
H1N1vaccine these numbers should change for pharmacists and other
healthcare professionals.
APhA Pulse on Pharmacy Surveys use e-mail messages to prompt members
to respond to short online questionnaires. Because of the methodology
used, Pulse on Pharmacy Survey results are not scientifically valid.
They are used by APhA staff to get rough ideas of the needs and
interests of members of APhA as well as the challenges they face.
The 85 APhA Pulse on Pharmacy Survey respondents indicated that
questions are about evenly split between the two types of influenza. The
average number of weekly queries per pharmacist was 21 for seasonal and
24 for H1N1 flu. Taken together, that frequency of inquiries is similar
to what pharmacists in other APhA surveys have said they get for the
most common diseases such as diabetes and dyslipidemias.
Pharmacists also said that they get about 13 questions each week from
friends and family—an average of nearly 2 per calendar day.
Answering questions about influenza is something pharmacists are
comfortable with. In the Pulse on Pharmacy Survey, 95% of pharmacists
said they were very or somewhat prepared to field patient questions
about seasonal influenza. For H1N1, 89% of respondents were very or
somewhat prepared. Within those groups, however, the proportions of
respondents who felt very prepared were higher for the seasonal
influenza variants, 69% versus 45% for H1N1 influenza.
About one-half of Pulse on Pharmacy Survey respondents were
immunizing pharmacists, and 79% were APhA members. Most had been in
practice for more than 10 years, one-half were practicing in community,
outpatient, or mail-service pharmacy, and 20% were affiliated with
schools of pharmacy.
Web links
L. Michael Posey, BPharm (mposey@aphanet.org)
Posted November 5, 2009, 11:00 am EST
|
