The Survey on the Use of Social Media by Thai Community Pharmacists in Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract

Social media users are rapidly expanding worldwide including pharmacists. There were many international researches on pharmacist’s use of social media. However, this issue among Thai community pharmacist remains unknown. Thus, this survey was conducted to describe the utilization of social media by community pharmacists in the Capital of Thailand, Bangkok. A questionnaire was used to collect data from 249 community pharmacists during January, 2017. The content validity ratio was tested and the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.90. The results showed that there were 57.4% of female and 42.6% of male samples with average age of 39.4 years old. About half of them were single, 52.6%. Two-thirds of them worked as full time pharmacists. The mean of their income were 78,963.86 Baht/month. All of them currently used social media to communicate with patients (82.3), pharmacist (72.7%), other health professionals (34.9%), and physician (20.9%). For online connecting, they used smartphone (87.1%), notebook (83.1%), tablet (42.2%) and desktop (19.3%). Line® (97.2%) was the most popular social media, followed by e-mail (75.1%), Facebook® (64.7%) and website (24.1%). The purposes of social media using were for chat, search, get news, and post and share with 84.7%, 79.5%, 79.1% and 45.0% respectively. About two-fifths of them (40.96%) used social media every day for communication on drug therapy related information to patients. For the attitude on using social media for communicating with patients, the results showed that social media became a new channel to improve pharmacist-patient communication. In conclusion, Thai community pharmacist in Bangkok routinely uses social media to chat, search, get news, and post and share with patients, pharmacists, other health professionals and physicians. They also perceived that social media has become a new channel to improve pharmacist-patient communication.