Ifeanyichukwu Offor1,2,
Ehijie FO Enato1 
For correspondence:- Ehijie Enato Email: enatoefo@uniben.edu
Received: 12 January 2011 Accepted: 28 June 2011 Published: 20 August 2011
Citation: Offor I, Enato EF. Patients´ Assessment of Pharmacists´ Medication Counseling in a Psychiatric Hospital in Nigeria. Trop J Pharm Res 2011; 10(4):507-516 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v10i4.17
© 2011 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..
Purpose: To assess the impact of an educational intervention on pharmacists’ medication counselling practice, and evaluate the reliability of an instrument to assess medication counselling in a psychiatric setting.
Methods: The study was undertaken on a sample of 297 psychiatric patients. Pre- and post-intervention surveys were conducted immediately after the patients had been attended to at the hospital’s outpatient pharmacy, using a self-administered questionnaire, comprising 4 components. Internal consistency of the questionnaire was computed using Cronbach’s alpha. Differences between means or proportions of variables were evaluated using Student’s t-test or Chi-square test, as appropriate.
Results: The study achieved a response rate of 89 and 92 % for pre– and post–intervention surveys, respectively. Cronbach’s alpha reliability of the instrument was found to be 0.74. The mean values for the different components evaluated during the pre- and post–intervention surveys were: Needs assessment, 1.89± 0.76 and 2.58 ± 0.61; Precaution and warning, 1.50 ± 0.67 and 2.15 ± 0.63; Managing therapy, 1.87 ± 0.89 and 2.46 ± 0.78, and Communication, 2.23 ± 0.77 and 2.69 ± 0.62, respectively. The post–intervention results were significantly higher in all the components (p < 0.05).
Conclusion: The educational intervention provided for pharmacists resulted in an improvement in patient counselling. The survey instrument achieved a fairly satisfactory reliability result in a psychiatric setting. Efforts to sustain this intervention are recommended.
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