Abstract
Background: Patients need to know dosing instructions of their medicines to ensure safe and effective therapeutic outcomes. Pharmacists play a key role in providing accurate and complete dosing instruction to patients each time medicines are dispensed. Objective: To assess perceptions of pharmacists, on the importance of giving specific dosing instructions, suitable mode, current practices, difficulties encountered, and on factors that could improve current practices of giving dosing instructions to patients. Method: A cross-sectional study was conducted among all pharmacists working in out-patient pharmacies of a selected teaching hospital and a selected community pharmacy in the Colombo district. An interviewee administered questionnaire, developed in-house was used. Results: Only 73% pharmacists agreed it was essential to give dosing instructions every time medicines were dispensed. Pharmacists’ perception on the suitable mode of giving instructions differed from their self-reported current practices (P Conclusion: Pharmacists agreed that giving dosing instructions to patients was essential but most did not practice what they believed. They highlighted the high patient to pharmacists ratio as a main barrier and requested more training on providing dosing instructions to improve this process.
Highlights
Patients need to know proper dosing instructions of their medicines to ensure safe and effective therapeutic outcomes
Interviews that sought patient opinion on counselling showed that, counselling by pharmacists is beneficial for their medicine use (2) and pharmacists were their preferred mode of medication information.(3) Patients mostly expected to receive advice about how, how often and when to use their medicines.(4) they must be properly counselled on name and purpose of the medicine, directions for use, side effects, precautions, contraindications and storage conditions while monitoring for drug interactions and adverse drug reactions.(1) Pharmacists are the only professional group who are often in direct contact with customers in need of medicines information (5), especially when dispensing over the counter medicines
Most pharmacists (73.0%) agreed that the majority of dosing instructions were important to be given to patients
Summary
Patients need to know proper dosing instructions of their medicines to ensure safe and effective therapeutic outcomes. The Code of Ethics of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain states that in supplying medicines, pharmacist must ensure that ‘the patient receives sufficient information and advice to enable the safe and effective use of medicines. (1) pharmacists have an obligation to provide accurate and complete dosing instruction to patients each time medicines are dispensed. It is important that pharmacists are provided with the right environment and facilities to effectively disseminate medicine related information to patients. It is important to assess the level of importance pharmacists attribute to providing dosing instructions in a suitable mode before this task is entrusted upon them. Except for a Korean study that reported both patients’ and pharmacists’ low satisfaction level regarding patient counselling by evaluating their perceptions, only a few studies have been published on this aspect to date.(8) we aimed to assess perceptions of pharmacists on, the importance of giving specific dosing instructions, the suitable mode, current practices, difficulties encountered, and factors that could improve current practices on giving dosing instructions to patients
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