Community pharmaceutical care: an 8-month critical review of two pharmacies in Kampala

The concept of pharmaceutical care is neither well developed nor adequately documented in Uganda.

This study is therefore an attempt to identify and quantify the various service components of community pharmacy practice in Kampala, Uganda's capital city.

Two pharmacies operating retail outlets were chosen out of about 110 in Kampala. The city itself is fairly small with a rather congested population. It is Uganda's economic hub with the greatest number of private sector health facilities and pharmacy outlets.

This study involved an 8-month observation period at the two pharmacies, combined with a data collection form to record demographic characteristics of respondents and parameters such as self-medication, pharmacy initiated therapy, prescription filling, patient/non-patient clients and treatment received.

567 observations were made. Missing data for parameters studied were omitted during analysis, thus yielding different totals for the various sets of variables. Just less than half of 564 respondents (44.3%), were females compared to males (55.7%). The study found that clients over the age of 12 years seeking pharmaceutical services were 8-fold (93.1%) more likely to be the very patients compared to children (OR = 8.3; 95% CI, 3.7-18.7). Slightly over thirty percent of respondents (32.3%) were third party patients. About fifteen percent (14.7%) of respondents came to fill prescriptions, 28.8% to receive pharmacy-initiated therapy and 56.5% came for self-medication with all drugs including antibiotics at 22.4%. Most clients (75.2%) received treatment. The availability of a drug at the pharmacy was found to be a significant predictor of whether treatment was received, with the client age acting as a confounding variable (OR = 59.7; 95% CI 25.9-137.6).