Patient's satisfaction level with community pharmacies services in Romania: a questionnaire-based study

Introduction: The patient satisfaction questionnaires in literature are according to the community pharmacies services in the authors' countries and not all have psychometric reports to support the results. We designed a questionnaire specific to the services of community pharmacies in Romania to evaluate the level of patient satisfaction. Methods: We carried out a cross-sectional study on voluntary patients. The questionnaire consisted of 22 items, grouped into three domains corresponding to patient satisfaction with pharmacies, pharmaceutical staff and medication availability, and four subdomains related to pharmaceutical staff skills. The 5-point Likert scale was used. Statistical analysis was done in SPSS 27.0. Results: The Cronbach's Alpha was 0.861. The Inter-rater Agreement was 72.0%, the Item Content Validity was 97.6% and the completeness index was 100%. The factor analysis indicated 6 factors (Eigen values >1.0). The 809 patients had a median of overall satisfaction score of 3.77; the median was 4.0 regarding satisfaction score with pharmaceutical staff skills. Respondents characteristics varied the patient's satisfaction level (p <= 0.05). Conclusions: The reliability and validity of the questionnaire have been demonstrated. Overall patient satisfaction with community pharmacy services had a moderate level, but the attitude and confidence in the pharmacist had a high level of satisfaction.