Community pharmacists' knowledge of and attitudes toward oral chemotherapy

To assess community pharmacists' attitude toward and knowledge of oral chemotherapy (OC) in terms of drug indications, general dosing principles, drug interactions, adverse effects, and special handling precautions.

Descriptive, nonexperimental, cross-sectional survey.

Colorado, Kansas, and the southeastern United States in May and June 2005.

1,080 pharmacists in four divisions of a large community pharmacy chain.

Web-based survey.

Pharmacist knowledge of and attitude toward OC.

243 surveys were returned (response rate 22.5%). Overall, pharmacists answered 49.7% of knowledge questions correctly. Pharmacists were most knowledgeable about general dosing principles (69%) and least knowledgeable about adverse effects (45%) and special handling (25%) of OC. Higher scores were seen for pharmacists who dispensed a greater number of OC prescriptions. Percentages of correct responses did not vary based on years of experience or number of OC continuing pharmacy education (CPE) programs attended. On a Likert-type scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high), the average comfort in dispensing OC was 2.4. On average, pharmacists indicated that knowing about OC was important to their practice (3.7) and expressed interest in participating in additional CPE programs on OC (4.2). Of respondents, 94.7% indicated that their pharmacy did not have a counting tray devoted to cytotoxic drugs.

This survey identified several areas in which pharmacists' knowledge of OC could be enhanced. Handling of OC is an area of important need, given the low number of pharmacists reporting separate counting trays for cytotoxic drugs.