Scoping the required business management skills for community pharmacy: Perspectives of pharmacy stakeholders and pharmacy students

“Why Didn’t They Teach Us This?” A Qualitative Investigation of Pharmacist Stakeholder Perspectives of Business Management for Community Pharmacists

“…What we found was stakeholders believe it is important for students to know the basics and learn the big picture. Pharmacy programs could aim to prepare students with an understanding of the basic components of a community pharmacist business management framework [ 17 ] to be competent and confident with lower-level business management skills as defined by Katz [ 15 ]. This would align with pharmacy stakeholders in this study who described 13 common business management skills used across a variety of community pharmacist roles ( Figure 1 ), with these skills proportionally representative of lower-level management expectations ( Appendix B Table A3 ).…”

“…This study, informed by a scoping literature review [ 17 ] on business management skills required by the community pharmacist, employed semi-structured phone interviews with pharmacist stakeholders from Queensland and Tasmania in Australia. Pharmacist stakeholders were selected via purposive sampling to ensure that participants included a male, female, community pharmacist, community pharmacist locum, community pharmacist manager, and community pharmacist owner manager.…”

“…Inductive coding of parent node (1) extracted business management skills described in each interview and categorised these descriptions into a business management skills framework [ 17 ]. This coding revealed the business management skills that were described to be used across a range of community pharmacist populations ( Appendix A Table A1 , Appendix B Table A2 and Table A3 ).…”

“…Not all community pharmacist business management investigations have employed the conceptual, human, and technical framework. The researchers are only aware of studies by Ram et al [ 2 ] and Davey et al [ 17 ] that utilised Latif’s recommendation [ 14 ]. Ram et al [ 2 ] identified an important challenge for community pharmacist managers, describing an internal conflict between operating in a retail business and being a healthcare provider.…”

“…Business management research is an important resource for pharmacy educational programs to make informed decisions about the management skills—whether they be technical, human, or conceptual—to be included in curricula [ 14 ], but these are limited in number. Current business management studies primarily explore the managerial skills to be included in the pharmacy curriculum [ 12 , 17 , 18 ] and how to best teach this material [ 9 , 13 , 19 ]. Generally, the findings of these studies recommend preparing students with business management skills during their tertiary education program and to approach this through non-traditional, multi-method, or innovative teaching, as these methods have positive learning outcomes.…”