Exploring Community Pharmacist’s Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice toward the Provision of Pharmaceutical Care. A Prospective Cross-sectional Study from Saudi Arabia

BACKGROUND: Pharmaceutical care (PC) is the new way of practicing the pharmacist's rule; practicing the PC will improve the quality of life of the patient by providing advices and counseling such as following up the patient after taking the medicines. OBJECTIVE: Evaluating the knowledge, attitude, practice, and perceived barriers of community pharmacists in Qassim, Saudi Arabia, toward the provision of PC. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A cross-sectional study consisting of a questionnaire was conducted to gather data from pharmacy professionals working in community pharmacies in Qassim region of Saudi Arabia between September 2019 and May 2020. A sample of 130 pharmacists were given the questionnaire by the investigator. RESULTS: The respondents showed a positive knowledge as 60% think that the medications should be dispensed to patients only, and 95.4% of the respondents are willing to counsel and offer advice to the patients. For attitude, there was also a positive response as 92.3% agreed that primary responsibility of community pharmacists is for providing PC. For practicing, a positive response was also found as 94.6% of the respondents do collect medication history from the patient, while 68.5% of the respondents follow up the patient's progress and assured that desired outcomes have been achieved. For barriers, lack of space and privacy were the most agreed barriers by the respondents with 63%. CONCLUSIONS: Community pharmacists have shown good knowledge, attitude, and practice in relation to the provision of PC in our study and major barrier we found in our study that lack of privacy in the pharmacy in which the patients will not be willing to express or explain their health or drug-related problems comfortably.