Knowledge and behavior of community pharmacists towards detecting drug-drug interactions

Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) are preventable medication errors that can cause severe adverse effects for patients, which often involve more than one mechanism. Healthcare practitioners, especially community pharmacists, must know and manage potentially significant DDIs to provide patient safety. This paper mainly aims to determine the knowledge level of community pharmacists about DDIs and to evaluate the behavior of community pharmacists in detecting DDIs. For this aim, a face-to-face questionnaire, including a knowledge assessment test containing 20 drug pairs and ten behavior statements related to detecting DDIs, was applied to community pharmacists. Seventy-three pharmacists participated in the study. The study’s findings show that the knowledge level of community pharmacists, who are the closest health consultants, about DDIs is relatively low. In addition, responses were found to be moderate in detecting drug interactions.Although statistically significant and positive effects of vocational training on the knowledge level and behaviors of pharmacists were determined, it was revealed that education levels did not have a significant effect. In this regard, it is essential to improve community pharmacists’ DDI knowledge level through vocational training programs and encourage their interaction-detecting behavior to improve patient outcomes and patient safety.