A review of the provision of appropriate advice by pharmacy staff for self-medication in developing countries

Abstract

Background: Patients in developing countries often prefer to self-medicate via community pharmacies. Pharmacy staff are therefore in a strategic position to optimize the health of the public by providing appropriate advice to patients who self-medicate.

Objective: To determine the proportion of pharmacy staff who provide appropriate advice when handling self-medication requests in developing countries.

Method: A literature search was undertaken via MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL Plus, Web of Science and International Pharmaceutical Abstracts. Studies that reported on the proportion of pharmacy staff providing appropriate advice when handling self-medication requests in developing countries were included. The appropriateness of advice was determined by each author's definition in the original studies.

Results: Twenty-eight studies met the inclusion criteria. There were variations in methods, scenarios, how the authors reported and defined appropriate advice, and study populations. The proportion of pharmacy staff providing appropriate advice varied widely from 0% to 96%, with a minority providing appropriate advice in 83% of the scenarios performed.

Conclusion: There was considerable variation in results, with the majority of studies reporting that inappropriate advice was provided by pharmacy staff when handling self-medication requests in developing countries. Consistent and robust methods are required to provide comparisons across practice settings. There is also a need to identify contributing factors to poor provision of advice for developing intervention strategies for practice improvement.

Keywords: Appropriate advice; Community pharmacy; Developing country; Self-medication.