COMMUNITY DRUG RETAIL OUTLET SERVICES IN HARAR TOWN, EASTERN ETHIOPIA

Background: The main activities of community pharmacists are processing of prescriptions, care of patients or clinical pharmacy, monitoring of drug utilization, extemporaneous preparation and small scale manufacture of medicines, responding to symptoms of minor ailments, informing health care professionals and the public, and health promotion. Objectives: To assess community drug retail outlets service in Harar town. Methods and materials: The data was collected using pre-tested, self-administered structured questionnaires which have socio-demographic variables, type of drug retail outlet, approximate distance from Hospital, number of staffs, availability of reference materials and questions to assess the service of the drug retail outlets. The questionnaire was disseminated for respondents by the principal investigator and collected after a week The collected data was cleaned, coded, entered to Epi data. The entered data was transferred to SPSS window version 16 statistical software.  Frequencies and cross tabs were done to analyze the data. Result: From a total of 41 drug retail outlets in town, 36 of them were included in this study. Twenty six (72.2%) of which were drug stores. 25(69.4%) of respondents were male and 23(63.9%) were Diploma graduates. 34 (94.4%) of drug retail outlets select over the counter drugs, 22 (61.1%) of the dispensers always check legality of prescription in dispensing and 26 (72.2%) label all medications before dispensing. 30 (83.3%) of the dispensers give counseling for all dispensed prescription drugs and 29 (80.6%) of the patient advice include dose, frequency and rout of administration. 30 (83.3%) of the drug retail out lets have no separate compounding room, 27(75%) have no compounding services in their drug retail out let and 20 (55.6%) of the dispensers provide drug and health information for their community.  Conclusion:  drug retail outlets implementation of good pharmacy practice was very poor in Harar town.   The number of drug retail outlets which were not giving patient advice for OTC drugs in regular bases was highly significant. Significant numbers of drug retail outlets dispense prescription drugs without prescription.