Assessment of quality of counselling given by dispensers in the co-administration of enteric-coated drugs (medications) and antacids
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Date
2009-08-11
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Abstract
Patient counselling forms part of the quality pharmaceutical service provision in any health care delivery system. This leads to an improvement of patients’ outcome, a reduction in development of complications and adverse drug reactions.
The quality of counselling given by dispensers when dispensing enteric-coated medicines together with antacids to be used by a patient concurrently needs to be assessed since the oral administration of the two medicines at the same time would result in the premature dissolution of the enteric coating of the coated tablets leading to the absorption of the drug in the stomach, instead of the duodenum, and the patient not having the full benefit of treatment.
A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out in ten randomly selected public hospitals in the Volta Region of Ghana within a 2-week period in May to June 2009. A total of sixty-six dispensers, who have been practising for more than 3 months, were interviewed with a questionnaire. The data collected was processed and analyzed by the use of Microsoft excel.
Of the sixty-six respondents, 21.2% were pharmacists, 36.4% and 42.4% were dispensing technicians/technologists and dispensing assistants/attendants respectively. The study showed that there was much awareness among dispensers not to administer antacids and enteric-coated medicines concurrently but the actual time interval in the administration of both oral medicines was not well known
The result obtained in this study suggests that the about half (42.4%) of the dispensers working in the public hospitals in the Volta Region had no formal training in pharmaceutical service provision and this might have affected the quality of counselling given by this category of dispensers to their clients. There is the need to improve the competence of the pharmacy staff and to augment the number of staff by training, recruiting and employing people with formal training in pharmaceutical service provision by the Ministry of Health and the Ghana Health Service in order to improve upon the quality pharmaceutical service provision to the clients.
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A Thesis submitted to the Department of Clinical & Social Pharmacy, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology
In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Clinical Pharmacy.