Abstract
Pharmaceutical care (PC) practice is still limited in the United Arab Emirates. It is crucial to understand pharmacy students’ attitudes and their perceived barriers towards PC provision, to evaluate the effectiveness of theoretical and practical curricula in creating positive attitudes toward PC. This study aims to assess attitudes of final year undergraduate pharmacy students in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the barriers perceived by them to practice PC. A cross-sectional survey-based study was conducted in February and March, 2020, involving colleges in UAE offering undergraduate pharmacy programs and having students in their final year. Participants filled a questionnaire covering attitudes’ items, based on the Pharmaceutical Care Attitudes Survey (PCAS), and several perceived barriers. A stratified sample of 193 students participated from six universities, 85% were females, 92.2% and 64.8% completed or engaged in community and hospital pharmacy training respectively, at the time of the study. Attitudes’ items receiving the highest agreement were PC will improve patient health (95.3%), all pharmacists should perform PC (93.3%) and PC would benefit pharmacists (92.7%). However, 44.6% agreed PC is not worth the additional workload. Females showed higher attitudes’ total scores, median (IQR): 55 (51–58) and 52 (49–55.5) for females and males respectively, P = 0.032. Having incomplete courses was also associated with lower scores, median (IQR): 55 (51–58) and 52 (48.5–55.5) for “No” and “Yes” respectively, P = 0.048. Poor image of the pharmacist’s role and lack of private counseling area or inappropriate pharmacy layout were the most perceived barriers, with around 78% agreement. In conclusion, final year undergraduate pharmacy students in the UAE have positive attitudes towards pharmaceutical care. The current curricula may be satisfactory in fostering positive attitudes among students. Poor image of the pharmacist’s role and lack of counseling area or inappropriate pharmacy layout were the main barriers identified, among other barriers.
Highlights
Duties of pharmacists were, to some extent, limited to compounding and dispensing of medicines
The second item focused on the questionnaire, and included the following statements: covers adequate content on pharmaceutical care (PC), questions are arranged in a logical order, language is simple and easy to follow, all items necessary to achieve the objectives of the study are included, and any technical terms that can be replaced by simple terms
This result is consistent with findings in similar studies in Saudi Arabia [37, 38], Kuwait [39, 40], Qatar [40, 41], the United States [42], Nigeria [30], Poland [35], Nepal [4], Ethiopia [34] and Cuba [28], while Rahim and Nesar [32] reported that pharmacy students in a university in Pakistan had a “moderately positive attitude” toward PC
Summary
Duties of pharmacists were, to some extent, limited to compounding and dispensing of medicines. The concept of pharmaceutical care (PC) has been introduced as one of the emerging services in the pharmacy field [1]. The consensus was to define PC as: “the pharmacist’s contribution to care of individuals in order to optimize medicines use and improve health outcomes” [2]. Pharmaceutical care means that pharmacists should assess, monitor and counsel patients, set objectives, document, and perform a variety of other activities [3], and collaborate with other healthcare providers (HCPs), in order to optimize the patient-oriented service, improve outcomes and patients’ quality of life [4], and offer care alongside the product [5]. Offering PC services by pharmacists in different therapeutic areas demonstrated significant improvement in outcomes, mainly by identifying and preventing drug-related problems, as well as those related to the diseases [4]. The situation might be different some Arab countries, in which pharmacists’ orientation is still, somehow, focused on the product [7]
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