The Practice of Counseling by Community Pharmacists in Bisha Health Directorate, Saudi Arabia – Simulated Patient Visit

Abstract

Background Many organizations have suggested a minimum standard of counseling for patients, which includes information about the name of the drug, description, indication, how to use it, the method of treatment, precautions, adverse reactions, and any contraindications. Correspondingly, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended spending at least 3 minutes with each patient to undertake counseling. The present study aimed to evaluate the practice of counseling by community pharmacists for both over-the-counter (OTC) and prescription-only medicines in Bisha Health Directorate, Saudi Arabia. Method This was a cross-sectional study designed to be a simulation patient visit to community pharmacies at Bisha area. The simulated patient visit were include 73 pharmacies. Two scenarios were used in the simulated patient visit. The first scenario was for a prescription-only medicine and the second scenario was for an OTC medicine. The time recorded for every visit to evaluate counsling period. Results A total of 105 visits were conducted to the community pharmacies as follows: scenario 1 = 73 and scenario 2 = 32. The average time for the simulation was 110 seconds in scenario 1 and 73.4 seconds in scenario 2. There was a statistically significant negative correlation between the period it took for the simulation scenario and the time of visit during the day (rho = −0.396, p = 0.001) in the patient simulation. Conclusion It that the service in community pharmacies is selling medicines and patient needs to be given a greaterin these community pharmacies.

The Practice of the Community Pharmacists in Managing Potential Drug-Drug Interactions: A Simulated Patient Visits

“…The same result was observed in a simulated patient study assessing the practice of counseling by the community pharmacist in Saudi Arabia, where none of the pharmacists asked if the patients were taking any other medications. 33 In another study from Ethiopia, higher results were found as 11.7% of the pharmacists asked about current medications and 21.7% asked about medication history. 34 …”

“…Moreover, our findings were in accordance with the results from the Saudi SP study, where almost 83% of the participating pharmacists did not provide information about drug interaction. 33 Another study revealed that the knowledge of community pharmacists regarding DDIs was inadequate. Major and minor DDIs were not identified by most of the participated pharmacists.…”