Abstract
The types of drug-related information request from patients and health professionals, the extent of inquiry and capability of existing drug information centers are seldom studied in Ethiopia. This study aimed to identify the types and potential areas of drug information inquiry at the Drug Information Center (DIC) of Gondar University specialized Hospital (GUSH), Ethiopia. An observational study was employed. The drug information query was collected by distributing the drug information queries in different hospital units through two batches of graduating undergraduate pharmacy students. Descriptive statistics used to describe, characterize and classify drug related queries. Binary logistic regression test was employed to identify predictor variables to type of drug information query. A total of 781 drug related queries were collected and 697 were included in the final analysis. Near to half (45.3%) of queries comes from the pharmacists followed by general practitioners (11.3%) and nurses (10.2%). Slightly greater than half of the queries (51.9%) were focused on therapeutic information. 39.6% of drug related queries related to infectious disease case scenarios, followed by cardiovascular cases in 21.3% of queries. More than half of (53.9%) and nearly one in five (19.4%) of the queries took 5 to 30 minutes and 30 minutes to 1 hour of literature searching to answer, respectively. Pharmacists (with odds ratio of 2.474(95% CI (1.373-4.458)) and patients (with odds ratio of 4.121(1.403–12.105)) ask patient-specific questions in their drug related queries higher than other group of health professionals. Pharmacists are the primary drug information users and frequent drug related information inquirers at the DIC. Most of the queries targeted therapeutic indications, adverse drug events, infectious or cardiovascular disease related requests. This is imperative that drug information services can assist the growing role of pharmacists in addressing the patient specific drug related needs.
Highlights
Drug information is needed to assist various clinical decisions and will help to utilize well supported evidences for better patient care and clinical outcomes
Enabling patient’s involvement in their disease management and clinical decisions requires unreserved informed medical consultation and adequate provision of drug information. This will help in improved patient adherence and health outcome aided by the receiving of relevant and tailored medicines information which has been developed to high quality standards[1]
Gondar University Specialized Hospital (GUSH) is a teaching tertiary hospital serves for 7 million people in the catchment area of northwest Ethiopia and comprised more than 1000 beds for admitted patients
Summary
Drug information is needed to assist various clinical decisions and will help to utilize well supported evidences for better patient care and clinical outcomes. Trained professionals needed to ensure the information quality and to make decisions on resource selection, extraction, analysis of drug information and apply the evidences in context of the real practice from the large pool of available data With this regard, drug information centers have tremendous role as source of applicable and reliable drug information for healthcare settings with professional information filtering and censorship through applying Watanabe et al modified systematic approaches of to reply drug information queries[9,10]. Enabling patient’s involvement in their disease management and clinical decisions requires unreserved informed medical consultation and adequate provision of drug information This will help in improved patient adherence and health outcome aided by the receiving of relevant and tailored medicines information which has been developed to high quality standards[1]
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