“My Regular Pharmacy”: A Study on the Evaluative Criteria Consumers Use in Selecting an Independent Community Pharmacy as Their Regular One

Introduction

Deregulation, cost-containment policies across EU and the broader role of pharmacies in public health promotion, therapeutic/medication management and patient counseling, are the main factors that have altered the pharmaceutical industry’s landscape, heightened competition and increased the importance of adopting customer-centered strategies to attract and retain the customer (Castaldo, Grosso, Mallarini, & Rindone, 2016).

The deep recession of the Greek economy in the last decade (2010 onwards) has triggered even more radical reforms in the Greek pharmaceutical market with the intention to rationalize the licensing, pricing and reimbursement systems for medicines. Liberalization of the pharmacist’s profession, increases in rebates to social security funds, reduction in regulated wholesale, the enforcement of electronic prescriptions and the prescription of the active substance rather than the brand, are probably the most notable changes in the sector (Vozikis, Stavropoulou, & Patrinos, 2015; Kevrekidis, Minarikova, Markos, Malovecká, & Minárik, 2018). These developments have shrunk the sales of pharmaceutical products though community pharmacies by 41.2% in the period 2009-2018 (sales dropped from 6.8 to 4.0 billion euros; Health Economics Observatory of IOBE and Hellenic Association of Pharmaceutical Companies, 2019), reduced profit margins and intensified competition amongst independent community pharmacies. The picture gets even worse if one considers the population density of pharmacies in Greece, which is the highest among EU member states. More precisely, the ratio in 2017 was 97 pharmacies per 100,000 inhabitants (1:1030), whilst the EU-28 average is 31 pharmacies per 100,000 inhabitants (1: 3226 ; Health Economics Observatory of IOBE and Hellenic Association of Pharmaceutical Companies, 2019).

Based on the above facts and data it becomes apparent that within the competitive pharmacy market environment, independent community pharmacies are required to understand the factors that influence consumers’ choice of a pharmacy in order to develop the strategies and the range of quality (often niche) services required to attract, satisfy and retain their customers. Responding to this prerequisite, the objectives of this chapter are set as follows: (i) to develop an instrument that incorporates the core attributes of evaluative criteria that are used by patients/customers in selecting and repeatedly visiting a community pharmacy, (ii) to analyze the proposed attributes in order to put forward dimensions of evaluative criteria and (iii) to assess the reliability of this instrument.