Consistent with the findings above, approximately one-third of the informants indicated that the job-related or continuing professional development-related research trainings they received had inadequately prepared them for research. In addition, respondents were asked to indicate what they perceived as barriers to conducting research (Fig. 1). Lack of time (71%), lack of adequate training (60%), lack of job support (39%), and inadequate knowledge (28%) were the barriers to conducting research most commonly reported by the hospital pharmacists.
Figure 1. Pharmacists identified barriers to research (n = 120). Note: Respondents were allowed to choose more than one option.
We subjectively assessed the research capabilities of the studied cohort by asking respondents to rate how competent and confident they perceived themselves in performing different aspects of designing, conducting, and analyzing research using a five-point semantic-differential scale. The relevant data are presented in Table 3a and Table 3b. An overwhelming majority of the hospital pharmacists (at least 85%) rated themselves as moderately to extremely competent and confident in conceiving research ideas, including needs-driven ideas such as work-related needs and opportunity-driven ideas such as industry-sponsored study. Similarly, a large proportion (more than 80%) of the participants believed that they were competent and confident in searching the literature efficiently, collecting relevant data using pre-planned data collection forms, summarizing the data in tables and/or charts, and preparing an oral or a poster presentation (Table 3a and Table 3b).