Public perceptions of community pharmacy roles in public health services: further content validity analysis of free text comments from the PubPharmQ Questionnaire

Objectives: Establishing the extent to which the public is ready to engage in community pharmacy (CP)-based public-health-related services in the UK is essential for maximizing uptake. The PubPharmQ was developed to measure public perceptions of these roles to identify the barriers to and facilitators for service uptake. The aim of this paper is to describe further content validity testing of the PubPharmQ, through analysis of the qualitative free-text comments provided by participants during the psychometric testing phase of questionnaire development. Methods: Template analysis was undertaken of free-text comments provided by participants during the development and psychometric testing of the PubPharmQ, allowing for deductive and inductive analysis across the dataset. Key findings: Of the 306 respondents who completed the PubPharmQ, 78 (25.5%) provided at least one free-text comment (total 172 comments). Six themes were constructed from the data. Four themes, Role in Public Health, Relationship, Privacy, and Expertise, were deductively mapped from PubPharmQ scales. Two new themes were identified inductively; Perceived Capacity (i.e. perceived staff capacity to deliver public health roles) and Care-seeking Behaviour: Pharmacy First (i.e. likelihood to access CP for advice before another healthcare provider). Conclusions: These findings provide further underpinning support for the PubPharmQ content validity whilst highlighting one further potential perceived barrier to the public’s engagement with public-health-related-services in the CP (i.e. Capacity). Future use of the PubPharmQ should consider adding questions relating to perceived capacity of CP staff to deliver public-health-related services, and the likelihood of seeking advice from CP first.