The pharmacy profession has evolved into a more patient-oriented practice involving the provision of care, advice, and medication counselling. Pharmacists are the third largest healthcare professional group in the world and community pharmacists are visited daily by millions of people across the globe. On average, patients visit community pharmacists (CPs) nine times more than they do primary care physicians in a year. They are mostly the first point of contact for some patients and for few others, the only contact point. This provides the CPs with the opportunity to leverage on the interaction with individual patients, intervene in health-related matters, facilitate public health services, and provide other health and well-being services. Both the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA’90) and the code of ethics of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain enjoined pharmacists to be actively involved in patients care by providing information and advice on safe and effective medicine use.
Patient medication counselling (PMC) may be described as “providing medication information orally or in written form to the patients or their representatives or providing proper directions of use, advice on side effects, storage, diet and lifestyle modifications”. The provision of appropriate and adequate PMC by pharmacists could help pharmacists identify and resolve drug therapy problems engage patients in self-management of diseases, and prevent treatment failure and limit resource wastage. In developing countries like Nigeria, the provision of such patient-oriented services by pharmacists is still evolving compared to developed nations.
The provision of PMC is however compulsory and backed by enabling laws in some countries, including monetary penalties for failure to provide PMC for prescription drugs. Yet, pharmacists have often failed to deliver appropriate and detailed medication information to patients, despite increased interest in the quality of patient counselling, its propriety, and acceptability in community pharmacies. Though pharmaceutical care is fast becoming the mode of practice in Nigeria, most pharmacists still provide inadequate patient-oriented services including PMC. This may be due to professional complacency and conservatism, extrinsic system failures, and inadequate human resources for health as suggested by Abdu-Aguye et al. There is no PMC policies, guidelines, incentives or standards in the country. However, to enhance the quality of PMC, the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria (PCN), and the National Universities Commission made provision for inclusion of communication skills and patient counselling in the undergraduate curriculum with experiential training at community pharmacies and hospitals during the externship and clerkship programs, respectively. This is also included in one of the modules offered to community and hospital pharmacists in the PCN organized Mandatory Continuing Professional Development.
Many professional organizations in the United States of America and Australia have published guidelines on counselling with varying content. Various studies have examined the use of counselling guidelines by pharmacists, rate of verbal counselling with author-defined counselling content, and the content of verbal counselling. Pharmacists behaviors were evaluated in these studies, but others have observed both pharmacists and PCs’ PMC services. As much as it is pertinent to know the number of patients or consumers who received a pre-defined counselling content or medication information, it is equally important to know how comprehensive is the content of the PMC or the quality of the counselling received by the patients or offered by the pharmacists. Most of these cross-sectional studies did not evaluate the quality of pharmacist counselling which considered empathic understanding, acceptance, and the demonstration of genuine feeling during the counselling process. This study, therefore, evaluated the community pharmacists’ and pharmacy customers’ opinions on the content and quality of PMC provided by community pharmacists to PCs using the United States Pharmacopeia Medication Counselling Behaviour Guideline (USP-MCBG).
