Uso de cenários estratégicos para planeamento de recursos humanos em saúde: o caso dos farmacêuticos comunitários em Portugal 2010-2020

Introduction: The planning of Human Resources for Health is especially important in an environment of political and economic uncertainty as it is today. For community pharmacists practice, an environment characterized by constant technological innovation and increasing empowerment of patients concerning health issues, as well as a shortage of primary care physicians and a Primary Health Care Reform that is currently taking place, may represent an opportunity to rethink the role that community pharmacists may play in the Portuguese Health System, accomplishing the paradigm shift from a product-centered to a service-centered model of practice, that these professionals are experiencing since the 90s. Method: As a tool of strategic thinking, prospective scenario analysis allows us to imagine and analyze different alternatives for community pharmacist's future. The design of the scenarios took place in three stages: the first two stages were scenario building workshops, for which we invited experts from practice and academic settings where the main tool for collecting information was the brainstorming technique. In the final stage, we built the final scenarios with the information obtained in the workshops and with the information collected in the scientific literature on community pharmacists' role and factors influencing it. Results: This analysis allowed us to identify the critical uncertainties that will have more influence in the future for Portuguese community pharmacists, the «Legislative Environment» and «Ability to innovate and develop services». Resolving these uncertainties in a 2x2 matrix, we built our final scenarios that we named «Pharmacy-Mall», «e- Pharmacist», and «Reorganize or die». Conclusions: In these scenarios is clear that the future role of community pharmacists is dependent of pharmaceutical services provision, beyond the dispensing of medicines. These future community pharmacists will also have to gain new competencies in areas traditionally out of their scope such as management, leadership, marketing, information technologies, teamwork abilities and behavioral and communication techniques.