Evaluation of Pharmaceutical Services in Public Hospital Pharmacies of Federal District - Brazil.

Objective: To evaluate pharmaceutical services in public hospital pharmacies of  the Federal District Health Department - Brazil (Secretaria de Saúde do Distrito  Federal, SES-DF).

Method: A cross-sectional evaluative study involving the 15 public hospitals under the SES-DF management. Hospitals were characterized and classified into four hierarchical strata. The pharmaceutical services related  to programming (quantity of medication to order), acquisition, storage,  distribution, management, selection, information, pharmacotechnical  component, pharmacotherapy follow-up, teaching and research were evaluated  using validated indicators. Next, algorithms were applied and the approximation percentages of service compliance were calculated, then  correlated to variables that could influence their results through linear regression analysis.

Results: Only four hospital pharmacies presented good compliance with the  evaluated services, three of them belonging to less complex hospitals. Only the  storage and management services presented good performance. The variables  that most influenced the performance of the services were managerial aspects  related to pharmacists and non pharmacists' workload per bed, the existence of  a program for human resources qualification, planning goals and targets and a  manual of norms and procedures, as well as professional qualification and  adequacy of the area in which the services were performed (p < 0.01).

Conclusions: The evaluated hospital pharmacies had average performance for  services compared to the ideal and better performance in logistics activities.  Pharmaceutical services require constant evaluation for rational interventions  that increase the proportion of executed health care activities and local  management capacity to make such actions more effective, efficient, qualified  and safe in the context of the SES-DF hospital network.