Assessment of Pharmacist-Patient Communication in Bahirdar town Amhara National Regional State

Abstract

Problem statement: Effective communication between the pharmacist and the patient is an important aspect of pharmacotherapy as it ensures patient's compliance to drug therapy. But this is not the case, failure in pharmacist –patient communication most commonly associated with non-compliance with drug therapy including failure to omission of doses, errors of dosage, incorrect administration, errors in the time of administration and premature discontinuation. Pharmacists play a vital role in patient education in rational drug use. The issue of medication failure is one of the challenges in treatment .Pharmacist –patient communication is supposed to solve many problems associated with medication failure. Objective: To assess pharmacy professionals-patient communication in Bahir Dar town. Methods: The study design was both quantitative cross-sectional and qualitative. The sample was selected randomly .The data was collected using observational technique using check list, clients exit interview and providers in -depth interview .The data entry was carried out using epi-info and then exported to SPSS for analysis. and the qualitative part analyzed manually . Results: A total respondent rate of 758(98.44%) from 770 sample size was obtained. The provider didn’t advise 696 (91.80%) of patients about their medication. The major means of information provision was found to be oral. Respondents of 656(86.4%) didn’t have accesses to attend privacy to get information on their medication. Almost all health facilities (99.90%) didn’t provide consultation services with confidentiality.