Avoidance of medication errors is imperative for the safe use of medications, and community pharmacists are uniquely placed to identify and resolve the errors that may arise due to poorly handwritten prescriptions. Purpose: To explore the opinion and attitudes of community pharmacists towards poor prescription writing and their suggestions to overcome this concern. Methods: A cross-sectional, self-administered survey was conducted among the community pharmacists in the Jazan region, Saudi Arabia. Descriptive analysis and chi-square test were used at 5% p-value (p > 0.05) as the significance level. Results: The response rate for the survey was 78.66%, and 140 community pharmacists agreed to participate. Among the study subjects, the majority (73.57%) had a bachelor's degree. Nearly three-fourths (3/4) of the pharmacists (72.29%) chose to send the patient back to the prescriber when they found difficulty in interpreting the information from an illegible prescription. As many as 80.71% of the pharmacists believed that poorly handwritten prescriptions were the cause of actual errors when dispensing medications. The most commonly encountered problem due to poorly handwritten prescriptions was the commercial name of medicine, which was reported by around two-thirds (67.86%) of the pharmacists. The use of e-prescription was suggested by 72.86% of the pharmacists as a probable solution to encounter this problem. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the belief and attitudes of community pharmacists in the region and their opinions to solve this impending problem of poor prescription writing. Continuous professional development courses can be adopted to tackle the problem. Additionally, health authorities can work on incorporating and facilitating the use of e-prescription in the community sector, which can be a boon to physicians, pharmacists, and patients. Proper and extensive training is however needed before the implementation of e-prescribing.
Keywords: Jazan; Saudi Arabia; e-prescription; prescription errors; prescription writing.