Mediterranean Journal Of Pharmacy And Pharmaceutical Sciences

Assessment of knowledge and awareness of community pharmacist toward epilepsy

Authors Details :
Muhammed Mansour,
Aisha E. Alkadi,
Heba A. Alnayif

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Community pharmacist plays an essential role in educating the epileptic patients about their disease and medications. Improving the patient’s awareness may lead to improve their compliance and decrease drug-drug interaction and ultimately improve their quality of life. Pharmacist can detect the emergence of health problems and can help prevent progression of comorbidities. Considering the complexity of treating epilepsy and the lack of information about pharmacists’ contributions to epilepsy management, pharmacist performed pharmaceutical counselling, pharmaco-therapeutic follow-up and systematic measurement and evaluation of findings and increase medication adherence of patient with epilepsy. This study was aimed to assess the community pharmacist's knowledge about epilepsy and their treatment by antiepileptic drugs in Libya. The design of the study is a cross sectional study. The knowledge was collected through a questionnaire which included 35 questions divided into three sections: demographic data, general information about epilepsy and information about epilepsy and antiepileptic drugs. The questionnaire was prepared and validated by consultant training in Ali Omer Asker Hospital in Tripoli for two months. The findings indicate that over 200 patients are altered viewed, of whom, only epileptic patients were observed. The majority of the participants were female, qualification degree BSc and years of experience from one to five years. Unfortunately, some of the participants (40.0%) had poor knowledge and about 60.0% of them had good knowledge. This study indicates that the importance of community pharmacist in Libya requires more improvement to achieve the existing function and that the impact of continuous study of everything related to diseases and medicines is important to obtain a qualified pharmacist who can become an effective agent for a change.