Quality Assurance Instrument Focusing on Patient Counseling

Giving sufficient advice to patients about their medica-tions has become a shared responsibility among healthcare providers, including community pharmacists.1-3 If community pharmacists play a more active role in pa-tient counseling, it can lead to improvements in the well-being and safety of patients and ultimately improve the quality of care while reducing patient nonadherence, treat-ment failure, and wasted health resources.4-6 Although pa-tient counseling has received a high priority in professional strategies and health policy goals,7-9 the implementation of new medication counseling behaviors in real-life practice has proved to be challenging.10-12 To develop and improve the quality of counseling prac-tices, specific quality assurance instruments are needed in community pharmacies. Pharmacists are aware of the prin-ciples of quality in the manufacturing and compounding of medicines, but it seems to be difficult to extend these prin-ciples to customer service, especially to professional ser-vices such as patient counseling. Moreover, most of the quality management systems in community pharmacie