PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jack Charles Collins
AU  - Carl Richard Schneider
AU  - Clare Louise Naughtin
AU  - Frances Wilson
AU  - Abilio Cesar de Almeida Neto
AU  - Rebekah Jane Moles
TI  - Mystery shopping and coaching as a form of audit and feedback to improve community pharmacy management of non-prescription medicine requests: an intervention study
AID  - 10.1136/bmjopen-2017-019462
DP  - 2017 Dec 01
TA  - BMJ Open
PG  - e019462
VI  - 7
IP  - 12
4099  - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/12/e019462.short
4100  - http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/12/e019462.full
SO  - BMJ Open2017 Dec 01; 7
AB  - Objectives To determine whether repeated mystery shopping visits with feedback improve pharmacy performance over nine visits and to determine what factors predict an appropriate outcome.Design Prospective, parallel, repeated intervention, repeated measures mystery shopping (pseudopatient) design.Setting Thirty-six community pharmacies in metropolitan Sydney, Australia in March–October 2015.Participants Sixty-one University of Sydney pharmacy undergraduates acted as mystery shoppers. Students enrolled in their third year of Bachelor of Pharmacy in 2015 were eligible to participate. Any community pharmacy in the Sydney metropolitan region was eligible to take part and was selected through convenience sampling.Intervention Repeated mystery shopping with immediate feedback and coaching.Outcome measures Outcome for each given scenario (appropriate or not) and questioning scores for each interaction.Results Five hundred and twenty-one visits were analysed, of which 54% resulted in an appropriate outcome. Questioning scores and the proportion of interactions resulting in an appropriate outcome significantly improved over time (P<0.001). Involvement of pharmacists, visit number, increased questioning score and the prescribed scenario were predictors of an appropriate outcome (P=0.008, P=0.022, P<0.001 and P<0.001, respectively). Interactions involving a pharmacist had greater scores than those without (P<0.001).Conclusions Repeated mystery shopping visits with feedback were associated with improved pharmacy performance over time. Future work should focus on the role of non-pharmacist staff and design interventions accordingly.