Family Physicians in Türkiye Back Pharmacist-Led Medication Management, Study Finds

Family physicians in Istanbul view pharmacist-led comprehensive medication management as a welcome addition to primary care, but they see major structural and legal hurdles standing in the way, according to a qualitative study conducted between June and August 2025. The research, published in Frontiers in Medicine, explored how Turkish family physicians perceive the acceptability, value, and barriers of integrating pharmacist-led comprehensive medication management, known as CMM, into primary care settings where such collaboration remains limited.

The researchers recruited twelve primary care family physicians in Istanbul using purposive sampling, selecting participants with at least five years of clinical experience. Data were collected through semi-structured online interviews using a guide developed by an interdisciplinary panel and piloted for structural clarity. Transcripts were analyzed in NVivo software with a hybrid thematic analysis that combined inductive coding to identify emergent, context-specific themes with deductive mapping to the seven constructs of the Theoretical Framework of Acceptability. Inter-coder reliability was established through independent parallel coding, and trustworthiness was reinforced through member checking. Reporting followed the COREQ checklist for qualitative studies.

The participants, who reported facing severe daily workloads of more than 74 patients, viewed clinical pharmacists as a crucial safety net. The analysis revealed three core themes. The first, needs and opportunities, indicated that CMM offers substantial benefits by managing polypharmacy, mitigating physician fatigue, reinforcing patient medication adherence, and reducing overall workload and costs. Polypharmacy, the concurrent use of multiple medications by a patient, burdens healthcare systems and increases adverse drug events, which is the background problem the study set out to address.

The second theme, concerns and barriers, identified major structural hurdles including physical space constraints in family health centers, data privacy vulnerabilities under Türkiye’s KVKK data protection law, and apprehension related to the pharmaceutical industry. These perceived obstacles suggest that even physicians who favor the model anticipate practical friction in day-to-day implementation within existing primary care infrastructure.

The third theme, implementation conditions, mapped out what physicians believe successful integration would require: integrated electronic health records, formalized legal boundaries defining pharmacists’ roles, and joint interprofessional training. Subgroup analysis within the study indicated that early- to mid-career physicians demonstrated higher implementation readiness, while late-career peers focused more on operational burdens, a divergence that could shape how any rollout strategy is tailored across career stages.

The authors concluded that family physicians demonstrate highly favorable prospective acceptability toward pharmacist-led CMM. They emphasized, however, that successful real-world integration requires resolving macro-level infrastructural and legal barriers while establishing actionable interprofessional enablers, shared clinical algorithms, and compatible digital workflows. Because the study was qualitative and limited to twelve experienced physicians in a single city, the findings describe perceptions rather than measured outcomes of implementing the model, and the researchers note that the work represents prospective acceptability rather than evidence from actual deployment.

The combination of inductive and deductive coding was intended to capture both context-specific themes unique to Turkish primary care and broader theoretical dimensions of acceptance.

For health system planners, the study suggests that the demand side for pharmacist-led medication management may already exist among Turkish family physicians, particularly those managing heavy patient loads with limited support. The identified enablers, including shared digital records and formal role definitions, point to policy-level prerequisites that would need to be addressed before pilot programs could test whether the perceived benefits of reduced workload, improved adherence, and fewer medication-related problems materialize in practice.

Subject of Research: Family physicians' acceptability of pharmacist-led comprehensive medication management in Turkish primary care

Article Title: Family physicians’ acceptability, perceived value, and barriers of pharmacist-led medication management in primary care—a theory-based qualitative study

Article References: Salıcı, Z. İ., Sertkaya, R., Macit, Ç., Sancar, M., Okuyan, B., & Abdi, A. M. (2026). Family physicians’ acceptability, perceived value, and barriers of pharmacist-led medication management in primary care—a theory-based qualitative study. Frontiers in Medicine, 13, 1949962. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2026.1949962

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2026.1949962

Keywords: family physicians, pharmacist-led care, comprehensive medication management, primary care, polypharmacy, Türkiye, qualitative research, Theoretical Framework of Acceptability, interprofessional collaboration, electronic health records, KVKK data privacy, Istanbul