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Conceptual development of a measure to assess pharmacists' knowledge of herbal and dietary supplements
Hsiang-Wen Lin1, A Simon Pickard, Gail B Mahady
1Center for Pharmacoeconomic Research & Depts of Pharmacy Practice and Administration, College of Pharmacy, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60612-7230, USA.
Objectives:
To describe the conceptual development of a measure for assessing pharmacist knowledge of herbal and dietary supplements.
Methods:
A standardized approach to constructing a multiple-choice competency examination following 8 pre-specified criteria (eg, specifying the target spectrum of herbal and dietary supplements) was used to create an item bank. The quality of each item was evaluated by 5 herbal and dietary supplement content experts based on specific criteria in 3 rounds of review.
Results:
From 122 initial items, 56 items were retained for the item bank representing 4 content areas: efficacy/effectiveness, safety, drug-supplement interactions, and regulation. The experts tended to agree that the constructed items represented a wide range of difficulty.
Conclusion:
The initial development of a conceptually based item bank/measure of pharmacist herbal and dietary supplement knowledge lays the groundwork for a large-scale validation study. The measure should be useful as a standalone tool and as a component of a knowledge, attitude, and behavior survey for the assessment of pharmacist traits related to herbal and dietary supplements.
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