Patient's satisfaction with community pharmacy services, and patients' trust in the information received in community pharmacies are important drivers of pharmaceutical care adoption. An online questionnaire assessing patient satisfaction with the services received in pharmacies and trust in the pharmacist's advice, along with their determinants, was administered to 343 Romanian chronic and non-chronic patients. Using various statistical tests, exploratory factor analysis, and robust regression we explored determinants of satisfaction and trust. We found that satisfaction with services is predicted by pharmacists' attitude (β = 631, p < 0.001), low waiting time (β = 0.180, p < 0.001), affordable cost of the drugs (β = 0.09, p = 0.009), and drug availability (β = 0.157, p < 0.001). At the same time, trust in the information received is driven by pharmacists' attention (β = 0.610, p < 0.001), whether the patient received precautionary information (β = 0.425, p < 0.001), low waiting time (β = 0.287, p < 0.001), and whether the respondent is a chronic patient or not (non-chronic patients express more trust, β = 0.328, p = 0.04). Our study expands the existing paradigm that sees trust as a simple predictor of satisfaction by showing that trust and satisfaction are predicted by different variables, and thus they should be addressed using different strategies. In fact, we found that they share only one predictor-waiting time, highly significant in both cases. Our findings show that, without prioritizing trust in the information received in community pharmacies to reduce information asymmetry between patient and pharmacist, the focus only on patient satisfaction may lead to a scenario in which community pharmacies will end up to be better integrated in the business sector and not in the public health system.
Keywords: community pharmacy services; information asymmetry; patient satisfaction; patients’ perception; pharmaceutical care; trust.