Practices of Patient Counseling of Community Pharmacy

Patient counseling provides patients with essential information, guidance, and support. This study was conducted to determine the level of practice on patient counseling among different community pharmacies in District 2, Misamis Occidental.  This study used a sequential explanatory research design with sixty-five community pharmacists as respondents and ten (10) of them participated in the qualitative study. A researcher-made interview guide was utilized to gather the essential data and information from the respondents. The arithmetic mean was used to determine the level of practice of community pharmacists on patient counseling, and the thematic analysis of Braun and Clarke (2006) was used for the qualitative study. The average mean on the practice level in patient counseling was found to be 3.12. This implied that there is a moderate practice of the different patient counseling services. Not all services are highly practiced by the community pharmacists and some of the services are less practiced. Moreover, the emerging themes in the qualitative study explained the reasons why community pharmacists do not highly practice some patient counseling services. First, for the pharmacists who did not administer vaccines or immunization: (1) do not have enough knowledge on immunization, (2) have no training on immunization, and (3) limited services offered. Second, for the pharmacists who did not recommend the patients' nicotine replacement therapies or products to help them quit smoking: (1) not authorized to recommend patients’ nicotine replacement therapies, (2) patients are unaware of the products/services, and (3) limited services offered. Lastly, for the pharmacists who did not practice counseling through social media, phone, or telephone: (1) heavy workloads, (2) patients prefer face-to-face counseling, (3) communication barrier, and (4) Structural barrier in a community pharmacy. It was recommended that community pharmacists should highly practice different patient counseling services to promote a quality and well-rounded community pharmacy.