Development and Evaluation of Health Promotion Training Program for Community Pharmacists in Oyo State, Nigeria

Background. Community pharmacists have considered training in health promotion services to improve their practice, but no published study in Nigeria has provided such training to improve practice change. Objectives. The study aims to develop and evaluate the appropriateness and applicability of health promotion training provided for community pharmacists after identifying the gaps in the provision of health promotion services in community pharmacies in Oyo State, Nigeria. Materials and Methods. A 2-day training was developed, conducted, and evaluated on a 5-point Likert-type scale, semistructured questionnaire administered to randomly sampled 80 respondents. It rated participants' opinions on the training content, resource persons, and perceived sufficiency of the training. Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Version 21 with descriptive statistics while open-ended responses were analyzed thematically. Results. Response rate was 72.5%. Total mean score of participants' opinions on the training program was 45.67 +/- 5.802 (range of 10-50; midpoint 30). An average score ranged from 3.97 to 4.61 out of the total score of 5 was obtained for good presentation abilities of the resource persons. Respondents (93.1%) strongly agreed and agreed that the training was sufficient to deliver the health promotion services (4.36 +/- 0.765). They suggested the need to organize the training periodically (15.5%), training to cover other areas like use of diagnostic test kit and immunization (13.8%) and allowance of more time for interaction and sharing of experiences by participants (10.3%). Conclusion. The training was adequate for use by community pharmacists and fit for the purpose it was designed for.