Medicina Comunitária e Educação em Saúde

Abstrato

Analysis of Dispensing Practices at Community Pharmacy Settings in Ambo Town, West Shewa, Ethiopia

Jimma Likisa Lenjisa*, Biruk Mosisa, Minyahil Alebachew Woldu and Dumessa Edessa Negassa

Background: Irrational dispensing practices are like a severe deep rooted problem in Ethiopia rather than the other developing countries. However, unlike hospital pharmacies, dispensing practices in the community pharmacy had received little attention, and thus not well studied. The purpose of the present study therefore is to generate valuable data on dispensing practices available at the later settings in one of the largest town in Ethiopia; Ambo town. Methods: Cross sectional study was conducted in 15 community pharmacy settings including 255 clients from April to June 2014. Dispensing practices were evaluated using WHO standards. Data was analysed using SPSS Version 20.0. Results: Out of 18 dispensers working at these settings, only 3(17%) were pharmacists and the rest 5(27.8 %) were not professionally qualified (without having any college diploma or university degree). The average dispensing time obtained was 60 seconds. From the total of 225 clients visiting these settings, only 17 (7.6%) of them were found to be knowledgeable about drugs dispensed to them. Regarding adequacy of labelling, generic name, strength, dosage, and quantity of drugs were written on only 11.1%, 11.1%, 29.8% and 11.6% of the labels respectively. For most of the clients (90%), drugs were dispensed without checking patients’ identity like age. While for 6.7% wrong strength, 12% incorrect frequency and 24.4% incorrect total quantity were dispensed. Dispensing spoon was the only dispensing aid available at all settings. None of them were found to check the temperature of the refrigerator regularly and maintained within acceptable range. Conclusion: Generally, dispensing practices found at these pharmacy settings mostly were not standard. The issues worth considering and addressing are involvement of non-pharmacy professionals in dispensing, very short dispensing time, poor clients’ knowledge, poor labelling of medications, significant number of dispensing errors and unavailability of essential dispensing-aids. So there is a need for urgent managerial and educational intervention to improve dispensing practices in the country and in the study area particularly.