The conflicts between professional and non professional work of community pharmacists in Indonesia.

OBJECTIVE: The study aimed to determine the type of professional and non professional work of community pharmacists in Surabaya Indonesia and find the difference between time spent for performing both works in actual (current) situation and ideal (expected) situation. METHODS: A cross sectional study was conducted by combining purposive sampling for selecting the community pharmacists. Afterwards, the data was analyzed using SPSS v16 to provide the descriptive results and completed with Wilcoxon signed rank test to find the difference between time spent in actual and ideal situation. The sample size was 100 respondents of 300 pharmacists who have been practicing in Surabaya. RESULTS: From 100 participants just 30 participants gave response to the questionnaire, 67% was female who 20-30 years old at most (53%) with working experience as pharmacist less than 3 years (60%) and working 30 hours per week (60%) in pharmacy. Significant difference between time spent in actual and ideal situation was found. DISCUSSION: The time spent for performing professional and non professional work in ideal situation was significantly higher than in actual situation except for preparing medicines activity. This finding illustrated that the respondents did not have adequate time to provide ideal services in their daily practice. Therefore, they expected to improve their time and level of work in more professional manner. Surprisingly, they were also willing to provide more time and higher level of work in some non professional work. CONCLUSIONS: The Indonesian community pharmacists spent little time on both professional work and non-professional work in their daily activities. This indicated that the pharmacists did not focus on delivering quality professional work.