E-DRUG: Empowerment of Indian Pharmacists-Pharmacy Auxiliaries (3)
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Dear Dr Mandal and e-Druggers,
Re: Report of an all India Quantitative study of
Consumer perceptions, availability, role,
services provided, medicines and expectations of
pharmacists in India. http://www.ipapharma.org/pt/August2011/32-35.pdf
Many thanks for this valuable report. It contains
much useful data. In particular, I was interested
to read: "It is quite alarming that 61% people in
the capital city [Delhi] have problem in
accessing the much needed information on
medicines. It is not comfortable to know that on
an average 50% of the medicine buyers are finding
it difficult to get information related to proper usages of medicines."
In the report, there was very little data on the
specific question I raised in my original
message. This was to ask whether any other
e-Druggers had seen evidence of reluctance by
pharmacists (or pharmacist assistants) to point
out dangerous errors in prescriptions. The report
noted that some pharmacists asked the patient to
return to the doctor if there was a query about
the prescription, which is encouraging - but it
was not clear what these queries related to (they
may have been largely due to illegibility, or
they may have been due to dangerous prescribing
errors, or whatever). One might perhaps expect
that an independent urban pharmacist would be
more ready to question dangerous prescribing
errors, than for example a pharmacist working
side by side with health professionals in a health centre?
Best wishes,
Neil
Dr Neil Pakenham-Walsh MB,BS, DCH, DRCOG
Coordinator, HIFA2015, CHILD2015 and HIFA-Zambia
Co-director, Global Healthcare Information Network
16 Woodfield Drive
Charlbury, Oxfordshire OX7 3SE, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1608 811338
Email: neil.pakenham-walsh@ghi-net.org
HIFA2015: http://www.hifa2015.org