Quality assessment of community pharmacies: a scoping review

Introduction: Assessing quality in healthcare environments favors decision making with the lowest possible risk and the identification of strengths and weaknesses, leading to the structuring of reliable services. Objective: To synthesize current knowledge and existing literature on assessing the quality of community pharmacies (CF). Methods: This is a scoping review (SR) aligned with the methodology proposed by the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis, carried out in four databases, covering the period from 2012 to 2022. Basic qualitative content analysis and descriptive statistics were used. Results: Of the 1,103 documents retrieved, 64 were selected. Quality assessment has been carried out, most of the time, from the patient's perspective (54.7%), through quantitative studies (62.5%), cross-sectional (59.4%), and using questionnaires developed or adapted by the researchers themselves (51.6%). From the analysis, seven thematic categories and 36 subcategories were identified, highlighting, respectively, "pharmaceutical services" (81.25%) and "dispensing" processes (73.44%); "infrastructure and ambience" (70.3%) and "ambience and accessibility" (54.7%); "user experience and satisfaction" (67.2%) and "evaluation of community pharmacy services" (35.9%). It was observed that the categories of "people management", "patient safety", and "storage and disposal of medicines" were less evaluated and not all instruments used addressed all categories. Conclusions: This SR mapped scientific production regarding quality assessment in CF. This study shows the need to develop a standardized instrument encompassing the various evaluative aspects, which were listed based on the categories and subcategories identified in this review, in order to provide a complete overview of CF.