Short summary

The staff at community pharmacies meet customers who visit the pharmacy after searching for online information on illness, health and treatment. It is important for community pharmacy staff to have knowledge about the online information that customers have obtained before visiting the pharmacy to provide the best care to the individual customer.

Rationale

Pharmacy customers have access to a massive amount of information about disease, health and treatment. To acquire this information customers use different sources i.e. online search engines like Google, blogs by individuals and social media. 

There are different reasons why customers seek information about medicines on the internet, and the information they find is of varying quality and credibility. The staff at community pharmacies must relate to customers who visit the pharmacy after acquiring knowledge about illness, health and / or treatment online to provide the best care and counseling for the individual customer. 

Available literature, however, does not outline customers' online information search prior to pharmacy visits. With this project, we want to establish whether customers seek information prior to visiting the pharmacy, identify the sources they go to and their motivation for seeking that information with particular focus on searching for information online.

Description of the cohort

All adult community pharmacy customers.

Data and biological material

Data is collected in questionnaires by community pharmacy staff .

Collaborating researchers and departments

Department of Research and Development, Pharmakon

• Department manager Rikke Nørgaard Hansen
• Director of department Charlotte Rossing, PhD

Section for Social and Clinical Pharmacy, University of Copenhagen

• Associate Professor Lotte Stig Nørgaard, PhD

Hospital Pharmacy of Funen, Odense University Hospital

• Head of research, Associate Professor, Anton Pottegård, PhD
• PhD student Carina Lundby Olesen
• Research assistant Alaa Burghle