Objective:

To evaluate pharmaceutical services in public hospital pharmacies of the Federal District Health Department - Brazil (Secretaria de Saúde do Distrito Federal, SES-DF).

Method:

A cross-sectional evaluative study involving the 15 public hospitals under the SES-DF management. Hospitals were characterized and classified into four hierarchical strata. The pharmaceutical services related to programming (quantity of medication to order), acquisition, storage, distribution, management, selection, information, pharmacotechnical component, pharmacotherapy follow-up, teaching and research were evaluated using validated indicators. Next, algorithms were applied and the approximation percentages of service compliance were calculated, then correlated to variables that could influence their results through linear regression analysis.

Results:

Only four hospital pharmacies presented good compliance with the evaluated services, three of them belonging to less complex hospitals. Only the storage and management services presented good performance. The variables that most influenced the performance of the services were managerial aspects related to pharmacists and non pharmacists’ workload per bed, the existence of a program for human resources qualification, planning goals and targets and a manual of norms and procedures, as well as professional qualification and adequacy of the area in which the services were performed (p < 0.01).

Conclusions:

The evaluated hospital pharmacies had average performance for services compared to the ideal and better performance in logistics activities. Pharmaceutical services require constant evaluation for rational interventions that increase the proportion of executed health care activities and local management capacity to make such actions more effective, efficient, qualified and safe in the context of the SES-DF hospital network.