A survey research of occupational commitment and prescription inquiries by community pharmacists

The purpose of this study is to summarize the data of survey research of occupational commitment of community pharmacists conducted in 2015 with a focus on organizational behavior regarding prescription inquiries. All of the subjects were pharmacists (n=206) of community pharmacies in Japan. Pharmacists must comply with the Pharmacist Act, and Article 24 stipulates the following regarding prescription inquiries: ?In case of any question in a prescription, a pharmacist may dispense medicine according thereto only after contacting the medical practitioner, dental practitioner or veterinarian who has issued the prescription and making clear said question (Article 24)?. Prescription inquiries are one of the important roles of the medicine professional. In this study, five question items were used to measure the intent to inquire. Each item was scored on a three-point ordinal scale (1 = unnecessary, 2 = neutral, 3 = necessary). Occupational commitment was measured using a modified version of the Affective Occupational Commitment Scale and Continuous Occupational Commitment Scale (Meyer, Allen and Smith, 1993). Responses were made on a five-point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree). To improve the understanding of the occupational commitment, this study presents a series of descriptive statistics and discusses implications for future research. The study shows findings of occupational affective commitment associated with the question in the prescription. The result suggests that affective occupational commitment promotes the necessity of questions in prescription behavior. Descriptive statistics display a slight linear relationship. As for the continuous occupational commitment, there is little relationship between each question. These findings advance our understanding of the impact of the affective occupational commitment on organizational behavior. Further investigation is required to confirm this relationship in the context of organizational behavior. This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 26380491, 15K03701.