Assessment of Pharmaceutical Care Competency of Community Pharmacists in a Nigerian State

Pharmacists practicing in Nigeria must embrace the Pharmaceutical Care concept and philosophy of practice to sustain their claims as custodians of drugs. This practice will improve patient care outcomes through humanistic, economic and clinical high cure rates, reduction in target symptoms, and decrease in adverse drug reactions. We assessed the community Pharmacists knowledge, skills and confidence to deliver Pharmaceutical Care practice in Anambra State Nigeria. Pharmaceutical Care Competency Questionnaires (PCCQ) were used to evoke voluntary and unbiased responses from participants who were all community pharmacists. Using three Likert-type response scales for knowledge, skills and confidence, to test the research objectives. Data gathered were first sorted using Microsoft excel before loading into SPSS version 13.0 for descriptive statistics analysis (mean, standard deviation, frequency distribution, and p-value). The result revealed mean computed for rated scores as follows; for knowledge was 4.03, for skills was 3.96 and for confidence was 4.02. This implied that the community pharmacists with minimum of B. Pharm degree have some skills to practice Pharmaceutical Care. The factor loading is > 0.4; Cronbach’s alpha for knowledge is 0.972, for skills 0.904, for confidence 0.931. This survey concluded that despite some knowledge skills acquired by pharmacists in their B. Pharm, training schools, there is still a gap between their practice and the concept of Pharmaceutical Care delivery.