Knowledge and attitudes of community pharmacists about COVID-19

Since the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), it has been considered an emergency situation that requires community pharmacists to be involved in direct patient care. The goal of this study is to collect information on community pharmacists' knowledge, attitudes, practices, and educational initiatives and pandemic preparedness, as well as to analyze challenges that may faced during the pandemic. Questionners from previous literature were used after translation and validation in a pilot study. Google forms were used to distribute the questionners to all the community pharmacies in Çanakkale, Turkey after ethic approval from Altınbaş University ethic committee. There were a total of 40 open-ended questions prepared to test knowledge attitudes presented as multiple choice or Likert scale questions. SPSS 20 software programme was used to analyze data. Among the all pharmacies, 60 pharmacists from 60 pharmacy were participated in the study. 70 % of those who took part in the study were women, and 30%were between the ages of 40 and 49. The mean score of knowledge based questions were 9.85/13, the majority of pharmacists were worried about being contaminated or infecting their families and were following the safety rules. The participants had certain gaps in their pandemic preparedness. To conclude, pharmacists have a moderate level of understanding of COVID-19 related topics, sufficient information about the pandemic, and they are strong enough to deal with the resulted obstacles. Although there are significant gaps and problems, the shortcomings can be solved by providing proper motivation and training to increase awareness.

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