The pharmacists had positive attitudes towards pharmacovigilance, but very little experience with reporting. The educational programme clarified their role and increased their knowledge about the reporting requirements.

No abstract

Sammendrag:Objectives: we aimed to evaluate the categorisation and clinical relevance of DRPs identified by community pharmacists, and further, to assess the quality of interventions with the patients and the physicians as documented by the pharmacists. Setting 23 Norwegian community pharmacies. Method: patients with type 2 diabetes were recruited by 24 community pharmacists who performed structured medication reviews based on the patients' drug profiles and patient interviews. The DRPs identified were subsequently categorised. An evaluation group (EG) retrospectively evaluated the reviews. Clinical/practical relevance of each DRP and quality of community pharmacists' intervention with patients and physician were scored. Average agreement between the EG and the community pharmacists was calculated. Internal agreement in the EG was calculated using a modified version of Fleiss' Kappa coefficient. Results: a total of 73 patients were included (mean age 62 years, 52% female, on average prescribed 8.7 drugs). The pharmacists identified 88 DRPs in 43 of the patients. The most common DRPs were adverse drug reactions (22%) and wrong drug or dose used by patient (14%). Anti-diabetic drugs and lipid modifying drugs were associated with the most DRPs. The EG agreed with detection and categorisation of DRPs in more than 80% of the cases. The clinical/practical relevance of the detected DRPs was scored by the EG to be high or medium in 87% of the cases. The quality of the follow-up with patients and physicians was scored to be good or satisfactory in 93 and 98% of the cases, respectively. Conclusions: pre-defined categories of DRPs supported by structured forms were reliable and valid tools for identifying DRPs. The evaluation demonstrated that community pharmacists were able to identify DRPs of high to medium clinical/practical relevance, and to perform follow-ups of the DRPs with the patients and the physicians with a good or satisfactory quality.

Pharmacists submit valuable ADR reports which provide information complimentary to physicians' reports. This emphasises that pharmacist ADR reporting might constitute an important addition to the spontaneous reporting system.

Objective To investigate the quality of the smoking cessation advice on over‐the‐counter (OTC) nicotine replacement treatment (NRT) provided by community and hospital pharmacies in Norway and to assess any change in customer services and pharmaceutical smoking cessation advice after a change in legislation deregulating NRT from pharmacy‐only to general sale. Method A mystery shopper made 106 visits to 53 pharmacies in Oslo, Norway. The first visit was when NRT was a pharmacy‐only medicine and the second when it had become available from any outlet as a general sales product. The pharmacies were scored on 12 observation parameters regarding customer service and pharmaceutical advice (score 0–4, total possible score was 48). Key findings There was considerable inter‐ and intra‐pharmacy variation in scores. The pharmacies' total score ranged from 3 to 45. On only 14.2% of the visits was the service categorised as ‘Good’. There was no statistically significant difference in total score between the two test periods (P = 0.56), and hence no measurable difference in customer services and pharmaceutical advice as a result of increased competition after the switch to general sale. A scatter plot showed no relationship between the individual pharmacies' total score at the two visits. Conclusions Pharmacies' scores for the quality of their smoking cessation advice were generally low. There was no measurable change in pharmacies' customer service and pharmaceutical advice following the deregulation of NRT. There was little consistency in the total score between the first and the second visit to the same pharmacy. Improvement is needed in the smoking cessation advice provided by Norwegian pharmacies.