Int J Pharm Pract 1999;7:172-81

School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, United Kingdom M13 9PL
M. P. Tully, PhD MRPharmS, research fellow
B. Temple, MPhil, PhD, senior research fellow

Correspondence: Dr Tully mtully@fs1.pa.man.ac.uk

Original Papers

The demographics of pharmacy's clientele - a descriptive study of the British general public

M. P. TULLY and B. TEMPLE

Objective - To describe the demographics of pharmacy's clientele and of those people who do not visit pharmacies.
Method - A face-to-face survey was conducted of a probability sample of the population of Great Britain (Ž16 years of age) on their use of pharmacies. Statistical analyses were carried out using both traditional statistical tests and chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID), to identify the most significant predictor variables (P<0.01).
Setting - Members of the public in private households.
Key findings - Of the 1,882 people interviewed (71 per cent response rate), most (88.7 per cent) reported that they had been to a pharmacy at least once in the previous 12 months. Age and gender were the interacting predictors for respondents who had not been to a pharmacy in that time, with the proportion of women aged over 75 years who had not visited a pharmacy almost three times (30.5 per cent) that of the whole sample (11.3 per cent). Gender was the most important predictor for people who went to pharmacies every week, age the predictor for loyalty and purchase of medicines, and tenure of accommodation (with marital status and dependent children as interacting variables) the predictor for having had a prescription dispensed.
Conclusions - CHAID analyses allowed us to describe specific subgroups of pharmacy users with greater precision than did traditional statistics.