Abstract
This study was an exploratory survey, divided in two phases. The first phase explored the
multidisciplinary team’s expectation on pharmacists’ role and characteristic during palliative care, by
purposively selecting two palliative care teams for interviews and content analysis. The second phase
surveyed pharmacist’s perspective on palliative care to pharmacists who worked in tertiary hospitals, as
against the roles and characteristics obtained from the first phase. Self-administered questionnaires were
distributed to 858 pharmacists using stratified random sampling technique. The data was analyzed with
software by using descriptive statistics. From the interview data, it was found that the main role of pharmacist
to the team was general pharmaceutical care and pain management and the important characteristics
the team needed from the pharmacist were good working attitude and the team work. The data from
questionnaires showed that the ability of pharmacist in palliative care, according to the team’s expectation
was assessed at high level. When considering the individual care, the pharmacists thought they had
very high level of caring ability in physical, and then in the field of social care. For the mental and spiritual
fields they thought they had the ability at moderate level. By the role in team, the pharmacists thought
that they had pharmaceutical care ability at the highest level. Next lower levels were the using of specific
medicine and palliative care and the lowest level was the mental and spiritual care.
