Community pharmacists as antibiotic stewards: A qualitative study exploring the current status of Antibiotic Stewardship Program in Bahawalpur, Pakistan

Pharmacy Services beyond the Basics: A Qualitative Study to Explore Perspectives of Pharmacists towards Basic and Enhanced Pharmacy Services in Pakistan

“…In this regard, mutual goal setting, decision making, and knowledge dissemination between physicians, pharmacists, and patients is essential to advance a team approach to delivering patient care. In order to promote the role of the pharmacist and improve awareness about the benefits of pharmacy services in community settings, pharmacists need to take advantage of their position and should interact directly with the public by ensuring their presence at community pharmacies, rather than renting out pharmacy licenses [19,20]. In doing so, pharmacists will uncover a large window of opportunity associated with community pharmacy service provision.…”

“…Pakistan is struggling with a number of threats to the optimal use of medicines, including high prevalence of medication errors (causing deaths of 0.5 million people annually [13]) and adverse drug reactions (detected in 60% adults and 40% children [14]), misuse of controlled substances (by 6.7 million individuals [15]), and excessive self-medication [16]. There is also a growing list of medicine-related issues that demand immediate participation of pharmacists in the patient's welfare, including over-the-counter (OTC) availability of prescription medicines, inappropriate use of medicines, formulation issues, unsafe storage and disposal of medicines, and poor availability of medicines [16][17][18][19][20][21]. Additionally, poor health in the female population, elderly, and medically underserved rural populations in Pakistan need scalable and affordable community pharmacy services, such as health screening (e.g., diabetes, cholesterol, osteoporosis), timely immunizations, pain control, and home-based care delivery and family planning services [22,23].…”

“…Despite these ongoing government-level efforts, as well as literature and policy calling for the implementation of pharmacy services, lack of recognition of the full scope of pharmacy services has remained a significant impediment for pharmacists to gain a foothold as competent and recognized healthcare professionals in Pakistan [24]. With very few exceptions, advanced patient-oriented pharmacy services are not offered at hospitals or in the private sector drug retail outlets (community pharmacies) in Pakistan [19,20,27]. Barriers to the recognition and expansion of pharmacy services in both hospital and community settings include suboptimal enforcement of rules and regulations, administrative barriers, inadequate number of pharmacy workers (only 0.06 pharmacists available for about 10,000 people-6/1,000,000), lack of academic capability of the pharmacist in terms of patient-oriented clinical services, lack of collaboration with other healthcare professionals, and lack of awareness regarding the existence and role of the pharmacist amongst the Pakistani public [20,24].…”

Why is Pakistan vulnerable to COVID‐19 associated morbidity and mortality? A scoping review

“…70 In addition, a number of studies have indicated that existing healthcare workforce were overburdened, 21,71 and the mean consultation time (1.2-2.2 minutes) and the dispensing time (8.7-38 seconds) in the public sector facilities were suboptimal. 72,73 Moreover, unavailability of qualified and trained community pharmacists at drug retail outlets add fuel to the fire, 74 as patients are not provided with required consultation and infection prevention measures for common infections. 38,[75][76][77] However, there are growing debates that pharmacists-being the first to be reached by patients in resource deprived settings-have all the abilities and expertise to forestall and resolve minor health issues, including infectious diseases, through proper counseling.…”

Evaluation of the Antibacterial Activity of Some Medicinal Plants Extract Against Some Human Pathogenic Bacteria

“…The overuse of antibiotics, its open purchase in the market and long-term usage over short interval have led to the major problem of emergence of resistant organisms (Taneja et al, 2019). The widespread usage, self-medication of antimicrobial drugs, drugs prescription with improper susceptibility tests and long duration of hospitalization was suggested to increase the problem of multi drug resistance in developing countries (Malik and Bhattacharyya 2019;Atif et al, 2019). The main issues and challenges reported regarding antibiotics resistance were, misleading advertisement, registered many products unnecessarily, illogical prescribing of antibiotics by physicians, easy access to drugs and antibiotics without prescription, widely used broad spectrum antibiotics with no surveillance systems, lack of experts and lastly, the wide spread use of antimicrobials in dairy farms, agriculture and poultry (Saleem et al, 2018;Khan 2018).…”