Pharmacy practice and concept of pharmaceutical care among Malaysian pharmacists

Objective: study aim to make an assessment and gather baseline information that necessary for the implementation of pharmaceutical care and identify needs and issues confronting pharmaceutical care practice in Malaysia. Our objective of the study is to evaluate the pharmacist perception in term of pharmaceutical care in pharmacy practice. Methodology: A questionnaire was designed to explore the pharmacist's understanding, knowledge, and their perceptions on the philosophy of pharmaceutical care and barriers to its provision, and also the current pharmacy practice. The cross-sectional study was conducted, which involved exploring and collecting data from community and hospital pharmacists in the West and East Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak), employing the self-administered mailed questionnaire approach. The community pharmacists participated in our study were selected according to pharmacies names, rather than pharmacists names. The mode of data collection chosen was a self-administered mailed questionnaire. The data was analyzed using the SPSS (R) (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) software program for windows (R) Version (12.0), and Microsoft Office Excel 2003. Results: Of the 927 questionnaires mailed to the hospital and community pharmacists, 269 were returned back. In terms of the responses from both the hospital and community pharmacists; provide a response rate of 45.8% and 18.5%, respectively. It was observed that most of the respondents from the both the hospital and community pharmacy settings tend to be in the younger age group (24-35 years) (77%) and (48.2%) respectively, (P< 0.001, Chi-square) It was noted also that the majority of the hospital pharmacy respondents were engaged in more than one practice site (73.6%). Only a small percentage of them were involved in a specific pharmacy practice site such as in the satellite pharmacy (2%) and drug information service (0.7%). In response to the question about the average number of prescriptions that they have received for each month, the answers given were varied and ranges from none (2.7%) to more than 300 prescriptions per month (0.9%). Nevertheless, most of them (69.6%) stated that they might receive prescriptions ranging from one to 30 for each month. Conclusion: We concluded from the findings of this study that although there is a sizeable gap in the practice perception of both groups of pharmacist. Pharmaceutical care concept is devastating tool among pharmacists.