Development and Validation of Questionnaire for theAssessment of Pharmaceutical Care by CommunityPharmacists in a State in Nigeria.

Objective: This study is to develop and validate a questionnaire for the assessment of community pharmacists’ efforts in the provision of pharmaceutical care. Method: A questionnaire based survey of community Pharmacists was conducted within Anambra State. The questionnaire was constructed in line with the Behavioral Pharmaceutical Care Scale (BPCS) and consisted of four sections/domains namely: demographic and other characteristics of the respondent, direct patient activity/current pharmacy practice at community pharmacy, referral, consultation and instrumental activities and exploring the awareness of pharmaceutical care. Face and content validity, construct validity, factorial validity, and reliability of questionnaire were evaluated. Reliability was established using internal consistencies with Cronbach’s Alpha. Factor analysis used principal component analysis and varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization. Convergent correlation was determined using Pearson correlation. Results: A self administered 25-item questionnaire was developed. Questionnaire evaluated pharmaceutical care rendered by community pharmacists. Ten questionnaires were collected for pilot study while ninety completed questionnaire were retrieved for the validity test. Factor analysis resulted in four domains/factors: demographic and other characteristics of the respondents, direct patient care activities/current pharmacy practice at the community pharmacy, referral, consultation and instrumental activities and exploring the awareness of pharmaceutical care. Cronbach’s Alpha for the whole questionnaire was 0.924, and 0.916, 0.840, 0.992 and 0.949 for the four factors, respectively. Four items used for convergent validity showed convergence between the related items. Conclusion: The questionnaire developed is a reliable and valid questionnaire for assessing pharmaceutical care rendered by community pharmacists in Nigeria. Further research is required to expand this instruments’ robustness. Keywords Community pharmacy, Pharmaceutical care,  Pharmacists,  Questionnair

Impact of pharmaceutical care interventions on the CD4+ lymphocytes counts (therapeutic outcome) of patients on antiretroviral drugs

CD4 count and viral load determine the progression of HIV infection. HIV actively infects and destroys CD4 cells. High viral load results in higher transmission risk and is also a sign of more severe disease. Measurements of CD4 counts can be used as an indirect means of estimating HIV viral load and as such determine disease progression and/or therapeutic outcome of antiretroviral therapy. Pharmaceutical care (PC) has been shown to improve the outcome of drug therapy in many disease conditions. HIV/AIDS is one of the disease conditions that are fraught with many problems that can benefit from this new emphasis of pharmacy practice also known as ‘pharmacists care’. This study is designed to evaluate the impact of pharmaceutical care activities on the CD4 cell counts of HIV/AIDS patients receiving antiretroviral drugs. The components of the American society of health-system pharmacists (ASHP) guidelines on ‘standardized method for pharmaceutical care’ was used as a data collection instrument to evaluate, document and intervene and re-evaluate the antiretroviral therapy of about one thousand four hundred and seventy three (1,473) patients. The results showed that that 55.2% of the patients recorded significant increases in their CD4 cells count, 14.1% of them maintained their pre - intervention CD4 cells count while 10.3% of them recorded decreases in their CD4 cell count. However, in 20.4% of the patients the CD4 cell counts could not be determined. The study showed that pharmacists’ interventions in antiretroviral drug therapy through Pharmaceutical care can significantly improve the CD4 cells counts of patients receiving antiretroviral drugs hence therapeutic outcome of antiretroviral drug therapy

Satisfaction of Nigerian Patients with Health Services: A Systematic Review

BACKGROUND: There is evidence that there is a link seen between the level of health-care services and patient contentment with those treatments. In Nigeria, we carried out a comprehensive study of patient satisfaction with health care. AIM: The researchers wanted to see how patient satisfaction with health services was described and analysed, if there was a reference point measure of satisfaction, what issues service users thought were important in providing high-quality care, and where there were areas of dissatisfaction. METHODS: We looked through the databases: Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, Excerpta Medica dataBASE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, PsycINFO, African Journals OnLine, CDSR, Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, and Health Technology Assessment. Hand searching was used to supplement the searches. Only papers that were published between 2007 and July 2018 were considered. Information from suitable papers were retrieved and examined by two different researchers after the first title, abstract, and full-text assessment. Studies were assessed using the COSMIN Risk of Bias criteria. Content analysis was employed to identify and analyse common topics. RESULTS: The total number of references found was 4509. Following the screening process, 45 studies were selected for data extraction. There was no such thing as a satisfaction reference point. Seven themes were found as being significant to patients. Major areas of dissatisfaction were uncovered. CONCLUSIONS: A multidimensional concept was used to assess patient satisfaction in Nigerian hospitals. The highlighted topics should be included in the creation of rating scales employed in assessing the quality of services in Nigerian health-care institutions