Is there awareness of pharmaceutical expenditure in the reformed primary care system?
To evaluate the effectiveness of feeding information on pharmacy back to primary care doctors in order to create awareness (knowledge) of pharmaceutical expenditure (PE). Retrospective cross-sectional study, through personal interview. Reformed PC, Sabadell, Barcelona. The 80 PC doctors working with primary care teams. As the personal feed-back on PE, each doctor was asked for the PE generated during 1997 and the mean cost of prescriptions to active and pensioner patients. The statistical test used was the t test to compare means for paired data, with p<0.05 the required level of significance. Out of the total doctors interviewed (80), 71 replies were obtained for the annual PE and 76 for the mean cost of prescriptions, for both active and pensioner patients. Significant differences were found between the annual PE in reality and doctors' estimates: around twelve million pesetas. The differences between the real mean costs of prescription and the estimates were also significant.
In view of the results, it is concluded that there is no awareness of PE among the doctors in the reformed PC in our area. This poses a question over the efficacy of feed-back of pharmacy information in order to create this awareness. This information needs to be more frequent and richer in content, and to be complemented by other measures.