Background In recent years, many oral antineoplastic agents (OAAs) have appeared providing patient convenience. According to law, in the Autonomous Community of Región de Murcia (Spain), these drugs are dispensed at hospital pharmacies in the outpatient setting.

Hospital pharmacists, because of their frequent contact with cancer patients on treatment with OAA, play a pivotal role in improving adherence and ensuring that medicines are taken correctly through oral and written information.

Purpose To know patient satisfaction with pharmaceutical care (PC) through a survey in ambulatory cancer patients who take OAA.

Materials and Methods A Likert-type scale on patient satisfaction with PC was designed and run on every other week for six weeks. The survey was completed by patients in an anonymous and voluntary manner. It included 17 questions in 5 groups: demographical data, PC request, opinion about the information provided to them, consultation with the pharmacist and global satisfaction degree with PC. Only these 2 latest question groups were considered for the analysis, including 5 items: pharmacist accessibility, courtesy, professional competence, patient opinion about pharmacist utility and global satisfaction degree with PC. Survey internal consistency was measured with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient.

Results This survey was completed by 57 patients (71.25% of the total; 53% men; 47% women). Answers to questions were graded with 5 points. For the items pharmacist accessibility, courtesy, professional competence, patient opinion about pharmacist utility and global satisfaction degree with PC, the mean plus/minus standard deviation values achieved were 4.53 ± 0.49, 4.53 ± 0.49, 4.29 ± 0.53, 4.29 ± 0.53 and 4.46 ± 0.53, respectively. Overall satisfaction extent was 88.33%. In this survey, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.85, so we can say that this scale is trustworthy.

Conclusions In this patient group, the degree of overall satisfaction with pharmaceutical care was satisfactory. Future surveys will be needed to cheque and improve our service.

No conflict of interest.