KNOWLEDGE AND INVOLVEMENT OF COMMUNITY PHARMACISTS IN HEALTH PROMOTION ACTIVITIES IN OYO STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study aimed at appraising the knowledge and involvement of community pharmacists in delivering health
promotion services in Oyo State, Nigeria, highlighted the challenges associated with lack of provision of the
services and identified the training needs with the aim of designing appropriate training programme for pharmacy
practice change in Nigeria. A cross sectional study was conducted between December 2015 and January 2016 on
selected community pharmacists working in Pharmacists Council of Nigeria (PCN) registered premises in the State.
A Pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire using a 5- point scale was administered to the participants. Descriptive
and Inferential statistics were used to analyse the data obtained, while an alpha value of 0.05 was used to test for
statistical significance. Response rate was 97.8% and 30.3% had undergone previous health promotion training and
22.5% showed knowledge of health promotion Respondents were actually involved in screening for hypertension
(4.56+0.85), health promotion for physical activity (4.43+0.74), weight management (4.25+1.03), smoking cessation
(4.22+0.89) and screening for diabetes (4.02+1.21) while the least activities were screening for dyslipidemia
(3.00+1.57) and use of contraceptive device (3.13+1.51). The major barriers to integrating health promotion services
into practice included lack of collaboration with other healthcare professionals (52.8%), lack of time (37.1%), lack
of clinical tools (32.6%) and lack of information and training (32.6%). Nearly all the respondents (98.9%) were
willing to participate in health promotion training. Community pharmacists indicated fair knowledge about health
promotion while majority of them reported fairly high levels of involvement in health promotion activities. The
respondents identify some barriers to their full participation barriers and were eager to undergo training to improve
services.