Dispensing of Common Antibiotics at Various Pharmacies in Karachi, Pakistan

Salman Ashfaq¹, Nighat Razvi², Fakhsheena Anjum^3* & Syed Imran Ali⁴

¹Department of Pharmaceutics, Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Karachi, Karachi, Pakistan
²Faculty of Pharmacy, Nazeer Hussain University, Karachi, Pakistan
³Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan
⁴Faculty of Pharmacy, Ziauddin University, Karachi, Pakistan

Dr. Fakhsheena Anjum, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan.

Keywords: Pharmacist; Pharmacy; Antibiotics; Dispensing

Abstract

The irrational use of antibiotics in various diseases can be detrimental to health and can promote the resistance too. The patients should be counseled about the use of antibiotic by healthcare professionals, particularly by the pharmacists, at the time of dispensing. This study was conducted to identify the availability of pharmacists at various pharmacies in Karachi, Pakistan and patient counseling during dispensing. The questionnaires were distributed among n=71 pharmacies from January 2016 to December 2016 which were situated in various districts of Karachi. The completed questionnaires were collected from the pharmacies, which were coded and then analyzed using SPSS version 23. The results have shown that the pharmacists were available only in n=40 (56.34%) pharmacies situated in the districts of Karachi, (i.e. South, East, West, Central and Malir) and they were also engaged in patient counseling. Most of the prescriptions were dispensed from district central (56.3%) and then by district east (32.4%). This may owe to the larger number of people residing there as compared to other districts. Prescriptions for some common antibiotics (i.e. Amoxicillin, Ceftriaxone and Moxifloxacin) were evaluated and it was observed that n=1500 prescriptions of Amoxicillin, n=200 of Ceftriaxone and n=525 of Moxifloxacin on an average were dispensed by the pharmacies on monthly basis. In general, out of about n=2961 prescriptions, approximately n=1224 were dispensed as self- medication from these pharmacies. Pharmacy professionals should be available at all the pharmacies of Karachi who can dispense the drugs safely and can also counsel the patients about their medicines; self- medication should be discouraged at all levels as such practices can lead to adverse health consequences.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).