Pharmacy Continence Care - Bladder and Bowel Website

3.6 Consumer participation
Consumer participation in the project was a major aim with the objective of assessing the
extent to which pharmacy provided information and assistance resulted in consumer benefit,
including positive health behaviour or improved health outcome.
Despite a carefully designed and well resourced consumer recruitment strategy, however,
the participating pharmacies recruited less than one tenth of the target number of
consumers for evaluation of the health and individual benefits of the Program. Feedback
from a number of the participating pharmacies has suggested that pharmacy staff consider
consumers are hesitant to participate because of their reluctance to publicly self-identify as
having continence issues. Follow-up by the project team indicated that pharmacies do not
have a practice of seeking customer feedback and this may also have been a contributory
factor.
To evaluate consumer benefits, pharmacies were asked to encourage and support customers
to whom continence information, advice or referral was offered (people with or at risk of
incontinence, and carers), to complete a baseline survey questionnaire in the pharmacy at
the time of the intervention. In recognition of the time impost for customers likely to have
limited time or interest in staying to complete a questionnaire after completing their visit to
the pharmacy, incentives to participate were developed and identified in consumer
information and on the consumer baseline survey questionnaire. Each consumer who
consented to be part of the trial was issued a printed questionnaire, together with a printed
reply-paid envelope addressed to the survey firm, Ipsos Australia, to protect respondent
confidentiality.
The consumer recruitment target established by the project team, after literature review and
consultation with members of the NOVA Expert Panel, was 500 consumers, an average of 10
consumers to be recruited by each pharmacy to respond to the pharmacy-based, selfadministered
consumer interview schedule. Each pharmacy was asked to enrol up to 10
customers to participate in the baseline and follow-up survey by completing the consumer
questionnaire, in the pharmacy, at enrolment, and to consent to a follow-up telephone
interview to complete the questionnaire at three months post enrolment. This sample size
was considered to be achievable, based on the number of people with incontinence in the
general population estimated to attend a community pharmacy, and the pilot Program trial
period of three months was determined to provide pharmacies with sufficient time to recruit
10 or more participating customers. It was expected that larger pharmacies would potentially
recruit more than 10 participating consumers, and that smaller pharmacies would potentially
recruit five or more over the three-month trial period. The project methodology proposed
that the 500 recruited consumers would be asked to consent to a follow-up study, to be
administered to a randomly selected sub-sample of 300 respondents by Computer Aided
Telephone Interview (CATI), by the market research firm Ipsos Australia.
Recruitment of consumer participants in the evaluation of the pilot Program was promoted at
the time of the Pharmacy Initial Questionnaire through an interviewer information guide;
through provision of a comprehensive and substantial consumer information resource kit to
each pharmacy (see Appendix 1.1.3), and through a financial incentive offering participation
in a draw for travel vouchers for pharmacies that succeeded in recruiting 10 or more
consumers, and for those who succeeded in recruiting five to nine consumer participants.
Participating consumers were advised in a brief introductory letter, attached to the printed
consumer questionnaire and signed by the Project Director, and again on the questionnaire,
that their participation would be recognised by inclusion in a draw for a travel voucher.
Despite these strategies, at the conclusion of the pilot Program operational period, at the
end of July, only 24 consumer questionnaires had been returned. In an endeavour to
improve this extremely low recruitment, the project team advised pharmacies, by electronic
Final Report
19
NOVA Public Policy
Pharmacy Continence Care Project