The relative high prevalence of self-medication with antibiotics necessitates taking serious steps by health authorities to implement the law of forbidding the sale of antibiotics without prescription.

Community Pharmacists are the most accessible health care providers who can help pregnant women with their medications use there are still gaps in knowledge where educational interventions are needed.

Background and Objective: Several over-the-counter drugs have been documented as an essential issue in the community pharmacy setting owing to their liability to abuse. Pharmacists act as a critical monitor for these concerns and evaluate the seriousness of the patients’ condition. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs regarding drug abuse and misuse among pharmacists at a community pharmacy in Riyadh city, Saudi Arabia. Methods: A cross-sectional study using a validated self-administered questionnaire was carried out among community pharmacists over three months April to June 2019. The survey had 25 items on the experience, knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, strategies, and opinions of participants toward drug abuse and misuse. Results: A total of 239 community pharmacists responded to the survey. About 84% of them had received training on drug misuse or abuse. The majority of community pharmacists (85.8%) would like to be provided educational programs on drug abuse in the future. Nearly all the pharmacists (94.9%) reported providing suitable advice to suspected drug misusers either in written or oral form at their pharmacies. Approximately 31% agreed or strongly agreed to dispense controlled drugs through a pharmacy. Regarding the ethical matter of selling misusers controlled drugs, 93.7% of the respondents believed that it is deceptive to offer misusers controlled medications. A comparison of knowledge and beliefs (univariate analysis) showed that the results were significant only for respondents who had graduated from Yemen (p = 0.007) and respondents who had an experience of four to six years or more (p < 0.01). Conclusion: The findings revealed that the majority of community pharmacists had been trained in recognizing drug abuse or dependence during their pharmacy college education. In addition, majority of them reported that they warned or counseled patients about the occurrence of adverse drug reactions to specific medications. However, majority of them agreed that selling controlled drugs is unethical in a community pharmacy. Thus, effective implementation of pharmaceutical rules and laws is a fundamental need in the Saudi Arabian health care system and we suggest stringent execution of the regulations by the Saudi health care authorities.

The prevalence of mental disorders was slight high. The rates of untreated mental disorders necessitate the healthcare makers in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to implement efficient strategies to halt the progression of untreated mental disorders.

IntroductionAlthough all implemented and ongoing initiatives, drug-drug interactions (DDIs) are still a global problem. Most published studies about DDIs in Saudi Arabia are carried out in hospital settings. In addition, assessing the knowledge of drug interactions in Saudi Arabia is limited. The aim of our study is to evaluate the knowledge of potential common drug-drug interactions among community pharmacists particularly in Saudi Arabia.MethodologyA crosses-sectional study utilizing a self- administered questionnaire was conducted among community pharmacy in Riyadh city Saudi Arabia. DDIs' knowledge was assessed by 26 drug pairs. Community pharmacists were asked to select the DDIs as “contraindication”, “may be used together with monitoring”, “no interaction” and “not sure”.ResultsA total of 283 of community pharmacists completed the survey with response rate of 80.9%. Among the 26 drug pairs only 5 of them were identified correctly by most of the participants. To add more 3 out of the 5 pairs had a cutoff of less than 10% between the correct and wrong answer, meaning there still a majority that couldn't identify the correct answer. All the 26 pairs had a statistically significant difference between the correct and incorrect answer.ConclusionThe results of this study showed that knowledge of community pharmacists about DDIs was inadequate. Community pharmacist should have specific courses in drug interactions to cover the most possible interactions that can be seen in this setting.