Evaluation of Competences at the Community Pharmacy Settings

The General Level Framework (GLF) document provides a model to be used in evaluating and upgrading of pharmacists’ competences currently used in many countries. This study has several Objectives: To show the adaptation process of the GLF document to the Serbian pharmaceutical work practices and regulations; to illustrate the implementation of the GLF document; to evaluate and monitor the development of pharmacists’ competencies. Materials and Methods: The adaptation, analysis, validation and adjustment of the GLF document were conducted using the expert panel method. The implementation was conducted on a sample of pharmacists employed in Subotica Pharmacy chain. Later, the evaluation of the pharmacists’ competencies was performed at two observation points (at the beginning of the study and after 6 months) by the team of seven GLF members. Results and Discussion: The GLF document was reviewed by 14 members of the expert panel. During the content validation performed at the expert panel meeting, all competencies stated in the GLF document were rated according to their importance with an average grade of between 8.26 and 9.80 and thus reached a consensus regarding all 26 competencies. During the evaluation of the pharmacists’ competences, the greatest improvement after the second observation was noted in the “Patient consent” competency, followed by the “Drug history”, “The prescription is legal“, “Health needs”, “Provision of written information” and “Assessing outcomes of contributions” competencies. All the competencies in the GLF document were accepted for the implementation in the Subotica Pharmacy chain. Six of the competencies there was a significant improvement observed.