THE INFLUENCE OF HUMAN RESOURSES IN THE SALE OF OVER-THE-COUNTER DRUGS OF THE PHARMACY

There are numerous researches which analyze the importance of human resources in the success of the organizations, although there are very little studies done in the pharmacy sector. The aspects considered included the following: the employee customer orientation, the training of human resources and the employee incentives established by the companies. In this sense, the main purpose of this work, that has exploratory nature, is to analyse the influence of those variables on the sale of over-the-counter drugs (parapharmacy products and advertising pharmaceutical specialties). The empirical analysis is based on the information provided by 234 Galician pharmacies through a personal interview. Due to the changes which have taken place in this sector in recent years, these companies have lost a high volume of prescription drugs sales; for this reason, they should focus some of their commercial initiatives on the sales of over-the-counter drugs. An Ordinal Logistic Regression and the Cross tabulation (Chi-square test) were used to test the proposed hypotheses. The results of this study confirm the importance that a good staff management has in the sale of over-the-counter drugs in the pharmacy, which is based on the customer orientation, the training of employees and the introduction of salary incentives.