Patient waiting time in Pharmacy Department of University Malaya Medica Centre (UMMC)

This study is to examine the relationship of patient waiting time in pharmacy department and their satisfaction with primary care especially for patient with long term prescription or repeated prescription. As the longer patient waiting time has becoming the bigger issue due to patient satisfaction and their compliance on their medication as it also will bring negative perceptions about the quality of services provided by this pharmacy department, thus University Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC) has come out with the idea of PharmCARE as one of the solutions or innovation in order to improve their satisfaction. From this report we can see whether it brings some changes and improvement. The subjects were randomly selected patients of this hospital itself including daycare patients, discharge patients and especially out-patient who came to pharmacy in this hospital to collect their medications. We had distributed questionnaire to the patients to gauge their responses to pharmacy as well as to measure the level of their satisfaction by introducing Net Promoting Score (NPS) to rate their satisfaction on the services provided by the pharmacy included their demographic profiles of respondent to see any possible relation due to the satisfactory. Lower patient satisfactory is due to the longer patient's waiting time. This can be seen from the difference feedback that is collected in the questionnaire about their satisfaction. Most of them has rated out-patient department as the most unsatisfactory unit as compared to in­patient pharmacy and PharmCARE. PharmCARE has received many compliments from patients that shows waiting time has been the stronger predictor of patient satisfaction than any other factors. In conclusion, patient waiting time in UMMC can improve by distributing the patient into their type. For patient from daycare and discharge patient, they must take their medications at in-patient pharmacy unit while patient from clinics and repeated prescriptions must take their medications at out-patient pharmacy unit. As we all knows that out-patient pharmacy unit provides with the most unsatisfactory unit, so PharmCare is built to solve this problem.