Pharmaceutical services in community pharmacy in East Jakarta

Abstract

Good pharmacy practice is an international standard for pharmaceutical services in community pharmacy, includes the advice for self-care for any symptoms or ailments that can be self-treated. Therefore, the needs of information for self-medication should be provided by health-care professional, especially pharmacist in the community. The objective of this study was primary focus on description of delivery of health care services by community pharmacies in terms of Good Pharmacy Practice, customer knowledge and perception about self-medication, and the pharmacies knowledge about regulatory information in East Jakarta Municipality. A cross-sectional study design using structured questionnaire was done to describe the good pharmacy practice in community pharmacy and self-medication practice among the customers. Questionnaire was developed based on the four elements of good pharmacy practice. For customers, score for self-medication practice was divided into information from pharmacies (Score 1) and their knowledge about the drug they bought at interviewing time (Score 2). 98 pharmacies and 294 customers were interviewed in this study. From 98 pharmacists, 69.4% are female. Most of the pharmacist worked as pharmacies licenser only for side job (71.4%), which mainly worked as government employee with 51.6%. The pharmacist experience at most is more than 15 years with 43.9% and the highest proportion of pharmacists come to their pharmacies once in a week (38.8%). The most of community pharmacies were independent (87.8%), with 49% has 101-350 prescriptions in a week. In terms of good pharmacy practice, 69.4% of pharmacies were concluded less than good. For regulation knowledge, 3 of 5 pharmacies has known at least 3 latest regulation whether 69.4% has only 1 or less document in their pharmacies. A significant association was found between job status of pharmacist, frequency of pharmacist practice, type of pharmacy and number of prescription with good pharmacy practice. However, only one significant association was found between regulation knowledge and job status of pharmacist. In customer, 88.1% of respondent get scores 1 less or equal to 4, whether 79.6% of the customer get the score higher or equal to 5. The summary for self medication practice was fair in 71.8% customers. The association was found significantly in education and income of customer with knowledge of customer (Score 2). By spearman correlation test, there was a significant association between information from pharmacies (Score 1) and good pharmacy practice. In conclusion, the practice of community pharmacy in East Jakarta was less than good; the self-medication practice among customer in East Jakarta also less than good and there is a gap in education/information practice to customers that can be fulfilled by pharmacist in the community.