Abstract

ASSESSMENT OF KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE OF COMMUNITY PHARMACY PERSONNEL ON GOOD PHARMACY PRACTICE: A SURVEY BASED STUDY

Drugs play an important role in disease prevention and health-care delivery. The availability and affordability of good quality drugs along with their rational use are required for effective health care.Health care professionals, patients, public, patient caretakers, and other professionals prefer to ask their medication-related questions to community pharmacists as they are easily accessible to them. It is challenging for pharmacists to keep up the pace of medicine discovery and development and have better and effective information than the patients retrieve information independently. Aim: To assess the knowledge and practice of community pharmacy personnel on good pharmacy practice. Method: This was a cross sectional survey carried out systemic randomly among community pharmacists - Observational survey based study. Different community pharmacies across Palakkad. The duration of this study was 6 months starting from Oct -2020 – April 2021. Pharmacist Recruitment: The pharmacist as per inclusion criteria were approached and briefed about the purpose of the study and requested to participate in the study. Those who have given their oral consent participated in the study were given the study questionnaire. The filled in questionnaires were collected back as per the convenient timings of the participants. Upon receiving the responses from health care professionals, its Internal Consistency Reliability was tested by finding the responses. Result: In the method of presenting drug use information in our study 63 % of community pharmacist provide both oral and written information were provided, followed by only in written format were 30 %