ABSTRACT
Objective: The aim of the study was to assess the effectiveness of educational interventions on the knowledge andcounseling practice of community pharmacists in Hue, Vietnam with respect to common cold management.Method: Thirty-eight pharmacists were invited to participate in educational initiatives, including in-class training andreference to a printed pocket handbook. The knowledge was measured before and after the interventions via a paperbased test, and actual practice was evaluated via a pseudo customer experiment a week later.Results: The interventions significantly improved pharmacists’ knowledge (p = 0.001). In the pre-test, only 37.4%of the participants provided correct answers, but this increased to 83.9% in the post-test. In the pseudo customerexperiment, pharmacists asked about patient identification, age, and symptoms (93.3%, 80.0%, and 80.0%,respectively) but not about medical and medication histories or allergies (less than 20%). All pharmacists offeredadvice as regards dosage, but only half of them shared information on drug names and indications. A third providedguidance on drug interactions. Practices related to inappropriate drug dispensing included the issuance of incorrectmedications or the sale of prescription-only drugs to customers with no prescriptions.Conclusion: Although educational interventions effectively enhance the knowledge and counseling practice ofpharmacists, a huge gap continues to exist between these variables.
ABSTRACT
Clinical pharmacy practice in Vietnam is unregulated by standard procedures, thus motivating this study, whichdeveloped and validated a tool called Vi-Med® for use in supporting medication review (MR) in Vietnamese hospitals.Six clinical pharmacists from six hospitals used the tool, which comprises three forms: Form 1 for the collectionof patient information, Form 2 for the implementation of MR, and Form 3 for the documentation of pharmacistinterventions (PIs). The tool also comes with eight pre-identified drug-related problems (DRPs) and seven PIs.The pharmacists were asked to categorize 30 PI-associated scenarios under appropriate DRPs and correspondinginterventions. Concordance among the pharmacists was assessed on the basis of agreement level (%) and Cohen’skappa (κ). We also evaluated the user-friendliness of the tool using a four-point Likert scale. Concordance in thepanel with respect to DRPs and PIs was substantial (κ = 0.76 and 80.4% agreement) and almost perfect (κ = 0.83 and87.6% agreement), respectively. All the experts were satisfied with the structure and content of Vi-Med®. Five of themevaluated the tool as very suitable, very useful, and definitely fitting for everyday use. Vi-Med® satisfactorily achievedconsistency and user-friendliness, enabling its use in daily clinical pharmacy practice.