Patient counseling as a valuable approach in Pharmaceutical care, A cross sectional study in Azawia city, Libya

Abstract

Pharmaceutical care is one of the most important new approaches of modern pharmacy practice, where in the last four decades the role of the community pharmacist is changed dramatically towards patient oriented services rather than product oriented services in order to promote safe and effective use of medicines and also to maximize their therapeutic outcomes. Patient counseling is considered as a main component of pharmaceutical care where it focuses on enhancing the problems solving skills of the patients to ensure safe, effective and convenient medicine would be provided to the patient for the purpose of improving and maintaining better health and life quality. The main objective of this study is to explore the practicing a concept of medication counseling in community pharmacies in Azawia city of Libya, and to evaluate the expertise of the pharmacists about that and also to find out whether they are practicing patient counseling in their pharmacies. Furthermore, this study aimed to collect and suggest solutions for problems and barriers hinder the counseling process.

This descriptive cross sectional study was conducted in the period between 8th and 25th Sep.2020, where the data was collected from randomly selected community pharmacies of different areas with in Azawia city. The questionnaire was designed of twenty one questions divided into two parts; the first part considered the profile of health care provider in the pharmacy, and the second part consists of nineteen questions involving open and closed questions. It was found that more than 50% of the care providers involved in this study were not pharmacists and only 42% of them were aware with counseling concept. Almost no counseling area was found in 50 community pharmacies participated in this study. Asking about chronic diseases, taking other medications and allergy to certain drugs were acceptable as the study showed percentage of practicing of 90%, 98% and 68% respectively. Moreover, counseling about drug interactions, contraindications and drug storage were not enough as the percentages were 16%, 20% and 8% respectively. Communication skills of the care providers need to be improved in order to enhance patient's compliance and in addition to that a lot of work need to be done either through the pharmacists syndicate, health authorities and schools of pharmacy in Libya to reinforce and practicing the counseling concept properly