INFORMATION RESOURCES AVAILABLE AT COMMUNITY PHARMACIES IN OMAN

Background: Health care professionals, patients, public, patient caretakers, and other professionals prefer to ask their medication-related questions to community pharmacists as they are easily accessible to them. It is challenging for pharmacists to keep up the pace of medicine discovery and development and have better and effective information than the patients retrieve information independently.

Aim and objectives: The aim of this study was to identify information resources of medicine used by the community pharmacists in various parts of Oman to update the knowledge and provide updated and effective information to the patient and other medical professionals. Other objectives of this study were to know the most common primary, secondary, tertiary, web based and other information resources used by the community pharmacists.

Methods: Total of 71 community pharmacies in different parts of Oman were contacted personally. Pharmacists at the sample community pharmacies completed a self-administered questionnaire that consisted of six sections. First section presented demography of population for the study. Second section elicited type of sources of information the community pharmacists commonly refer. Third section elicited type of books available in community pharmacies. Fourth section was to know access to online databases. Fifth section was to know availability of scientific journals at community pharmacies. Last and the sixth section were to know whether they refer any websites as sources of information if any.

Results: All pharmacies had at least one reference but most were books. The Oman National Formulary (ONF) and British National Formulary (BNF) were the most commonly found (n=56, 79%). The first, second and third most commonly referred secondary sources of information by the community pharmacists includes medline, micromedex and Pharm-line respectively. 10% of community pharmacists had internet access and 13% of pharmacists getting drug information from journals.

Conclusion: There is a need to improve quality of information accessed and provided to patients and prescribers by referring appropriate information resources to minimize adverse consequences of medication therapies and also to improve the role that pharmacists can play in the health system in Oman.