Case study: Identifying and managing dry eye disease in pharmacy
Challenge
People visit pharmacies to seek advice on a range of health issues, from hay fever to stomach bugs and sprained wrists. While we are aware that people may ask their pharmacist about dry eye, we knew little about the frequency of such complaints or how knowledgeable pharmacists are in providing quality care, since they receive little formal training on the condition.
The Pharmaceutical Journal and RB formed an innovative partnership to launch a campaign to help pharmacy teams better identify, understand and manage dry eye conditions in a community pharmacy setting. This was aligned to the Optrex brand. More information on the background to the campaign can be found here.
Utilising our extensive experience of commercial publishing across pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences, we adapted our existing insight-led approach to develop a campaign to meet this challenge.
Discovery
A survey was sent to pharmacist members of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) to find out how often pharmacists helped patients with dry eye conditions, how confident and knowledgeable they were in dealing with such requests, and which types of products or lifestyle adjustments they would recommend.
Top line results
80% of pharmacists (n=1,350 respondents) spoke with patients about dry eye at least once each week;
Nearly two-thirds of respondents were not aware of the different dry eye conditions;
Only 13% of respondents were aware of liposomal sprays as a treatment option, with only 3% likely to recommend these to patients.
Designing a solution
The Pharmaceutical Journal hosted an event with a multidisciplinary panel of the world’s leading experts on dry eye at the RPS London headquarters to discuss the results of the survey and decide how best community pharmacy could advise patients with dry eye conditions.
Source: MAG/The Pharmaceutical Journal
The insights from the survey and expert meeting were used to develop a programme of content to meet the learning requirements and provided a valuable resource to guide pharmacy teams in effectively managing the condition.
The content was also included in a print supplement of The Pharmaceutical Journal, which was delivered to over 32,000 RPS members.
Delivering impact
The content was well-received and generated:
- 22,458 total page views;
- 11,414 total page views for the two learning articles alone;
- 7,739 page views from social media links.
Outcomes
Following these activities, we surveyed members of the RPS a second time to assess whether the learning campaign achieved its primary purpose of educating pharmacists on dry eye. The results showed an increase in knowledge and understanding of dry eye conditions and the products used to treat them.
Top line results
The percentage of community pharmacists who were not aware that there are two types of dry eye condition had fallen from 64.3% to a under a third;
Confidence in diagnosing and recommending a dry eye condition had increased to 88% and 96%, respectively;
Reckitt markets a range of products for treating the symptoms of dry eye conditions, including liposomal sprays.
In the first survey, 13.2% of pharmacists were not aware of liposomal sprays; after the learning campaign, this reduced to 5.1%. Meanwhile, 11.6% regularly recommend liposomal sprays to patients, an increase from 3.1%.
Phase II
The Pharmacy Learning Centre on Eye Care was launched as a dedicated learning resource on the treatment and management of eye conditions in pharmacy. A total of 50 articles on eye care, eye conditions and pharmacy practice were compiled, including those from the supplement, the A5 technicians guide, whitepapers and The Pharmaceutical Journal. Alongside this, a programme of new content, related book chapters and articles was developed to ensure that content was regularly being added to the site.
At the end of the programme, the PLC contained more than 75 articles and had 31,560 monthly users globally, including 8,259 users in the UK.